


Forsaken, Almost Human

by Eighty_Sixed



Series: Lonely Planet [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Bible, Blasphemy, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Language, Minor Violence, Mortality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:55:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 52,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29771676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eighty_Sixed/pseuds/Eighty_Sixed
Summary: It's the big one, all of Us against all of Them. This time around, there's a Rapture, some zombies, a bit of demonic possession, a consultation with Death, a hellhound, a guided tour of the nine circles, many naked people who are not having fun, lots of trafficking of human souls, and some conflict arising from Aziraphale and Crowley's differing moral philosophies.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Lonely Planet [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2113563
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the concluding fic of what is now my Lonely Planet trilogy.
> 
> Title is from Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne".

“So, are you, like, religious or something?” Brittany asked.

Her date, Brett, was across the table from her at a Times Square Starbucks, and Brittany was drinking her coffee as fast as she could without burning herself. She held her phone under the table, wondering if she should text her friend Megan and ask her to call so Brittany could pretend there was an emergency and bail on this ill-fated first date. She had gone into it with some trepidation, because Brett’s profile had listed Creed as his favorite band and volunteering as his favorite hobby. But he had looked smoking hot in his profile pic, he was a Libra, and Brittany also couldn’t help but find some significance in the similarity of their names. Britt and Brett, how cute was that?

When they had found each other in the Starbucks, Brittany had felt a thrill of excitement when she saw that Brett actually was as smoking hot as he appeared in his profile pic. He was that rarest of creatures, a guy who had posted a recent, unmanipulated, and authentic photographic of himself on a dating app. Her excitement had come to a screeching halt when Brett took off his jacket and she saw the large cross necklace and _Jesus Is My Homie_ t-shirt underneath. But she had tried to reserve judgment. After all, he was damn fine. And maybe all the Jesus stuff was some sort of ironic hipster thing. Maybe he was from Brooklyn.

But when Brett reached for his coffee cup and she saw that his admittedly tanned and muscled forearm sported an honest-to-God _WWJD_ tattoo*, that was when Brittany felt she had to bring up the religion question. Back in college, she had briefly dated a born-again Christian, and he had sprinkled words like _gosh_ and _darn_ into conversation and had suggested that she come to church with him and his parents. Brittany was not about to go down that road again.

“Jesus Christ is my lord and savior,” Brett said, as if that was a normal thing to say in a Times Square Starbucks on a first date.

“Well, that’s – nice for you,” Brittany said politely.

“Have you heard the Good News?” Brett asked.

“If you mean have I heard of Jesus, yes, I have,” Brittany said, scalding her tongue on her coffee in an effort to make it disappear faster. Under the table, she angled her phone so that she could text her rescue request to Megan.

“So which church do you go to?”

“Um. I’m not really religious. I would describe myself more as spiritual.”

It was as if she had said that she enjoyed disemboweling babies and wearing their intestines as earrings. Brent took a couple sips of coffee in quick succession, and Brittany realized that he was having the same realization about her that she had had about him. Clearly, the dating app’s compatibility algorithm needed some work. If this was how people were supposed to meet their potential reproductive partners now, the voluntary gradual extinction of the human race seemed a preferable alternative.

Brittany’s phone broke the awkward silence with her ringtone, which happened to be “Milkshake” by Kelis. Upon hearing the song, Brett nodded to himself in apparent confirmation of Brittany’s moral shortcomings and their lack of compatibility. Brittany answered the phone and had a brief conversation with Megan, pretending that she was talking to her boss, and then ended the call with an apologetic shrug to Brett.

“I’m sorry, that was my boss,” she said. “I have to go in to the office now. Something came up.”

“That’s okay,” Brett said, looking relieved that he wouldn’t have to manufacture his own excuse to get out of the date. “Another time.”

“For sure.” They smiled and nodded politely in mutual relief that they would never have to see each other again.

Just as Brittany stood up to leave, there was a flash of light, and Brett was gone. His clothing had not gone with him, though. It was lying in a pile on the floor that Brittany would have found quite alluring if she had been more interested in the guy and also if it hadn’t been in the middle of a Starbucks.

“Um,” Brittany said. She turned and appealed to the coffee shop in general. “Did anyone else see that?”

The barista dropped a freshly made caramel macchiato on the floor. “That guy just disappeared,” she said, shocked.

Brittany could only stare at the _Jesus Is My Homie_ t-shirt in disbelief. Just when she had thought she was finally getting the hang of this online dating thing. Clearly, that algorithm needed a _lot_ of work.

* * *

Juwon checked off the last step in the pre-flight checklist. “All systems go, Captain,” he said. He liked saying that. It was one of the best parts of his job. He wanted to someday be the captain rather than just the co-pilot, but in the meantime, he at least got the consolation prize of being able to say _All systems go, Captain_.

“Not quite _all_ systems,” Captain Kim said, furring his monobrow.

“Sir?” Juwon frowned at the checklist. The safety and mechanical checks had been nominal and air-traffic control had assigned them a takeoff slot.

“There is still one item left on the checklist,” the captain said meaningfully, bowing his head and putting his hands together.

“Oh. Right.” Juwon obediently bowed his head too. Captain Kim was not his favorite pilot to fly with. For one thing, his monobrow was unsettling. Sometimes Juwon would see it out of the corner of his eye and be startled into thinking there was a massive fuzzy caterpillar on the man’s face. For another thing, Captain Kim always insisted on praying for a safe flight before departure. If Juwon were captain, there would be no praying in his cockpit. Praying didn’t seem like the sort of thing a self-respecting pilot should do. After all, it was Juwon, not God, who had put in all those hours at flight school and gotten years of experience as an airline pilot. What did God know about flying an Airbus A380, anyway? Certainly not as much as Juwon did.**

“Dear God,” Captain Kim said, “please keep this plane and all souls on board safe during our nonstop service from Seoul to Los Angeles on Korean Air flight 468.” Captain Kim was always very specific about which flight he wanted God’s protection for. Juwon supposed it would be too much to ask to keep all flights safe, or at least all the Korean Air ones. “And while you’re at it, try to keep all those poor bastards in coach from strangling each other with their seatbelts,” Captain Kim added with a grin. “Amen.”

“Amen,” Juwon repeated dutifully.

When they had taken off and reached cruising altitude, Captain Kim got on the intercom to update the passengers about their ETA and the weather in beautiful Los Angeles. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We have reached our cruising altitude of ten thousand meters. You are now free to move about the cabin, but please leave your seatbelt fastened while seated in case we encounter any unexpected –”

With that, Captain Kim and his monobrow disappeared. All that was left of him was his airline uniform, abandoned in his seat.

Juwon yelped in alarm, then chastened himself because no self-respecting pilot should be yelping in alarm. He took a deep breath, telling himself he had trained for situations like this. Well, not like _this_ , but he was perfectly capable of getting the plane safely to the ground. He took over the flight controls. It occurred to him that there were several hundred passengers aboard who were probably mildly curious as to why their pilot had just stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence. Juwon picked up the intercom to reassure them.

“In case we encounter anything unexpected,” he finished. “Which we haven’t. We were expecting an uneventful flight, and that is just what we are currently experiencing. And we are expecting that it will continue to be uneventful. Um. Enjoy the flight.”

A moment later, Chian’s voice came in on the private line. “Did Captain Kim just drop dead of a heart attack?” she asked. Chian was the lead flight attendant on the flight, and she was small and potent like the miniature whiskey bottles she handed out.

“No, he, well, he—” Juwon floundered, trying to verbalize exactly what had just happened to Captain Kim.

“Or did you take him hostage? Do you have a gun to his head right now?”

“No, of course not. Look, he’s just – gone.”

“Gone how?”

“Gone as in no longer in this cockpit.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Did you look everywhere?”

“Yes,” Juwon said. “I looked everywhere in this cockpit, and I can say with some confidence that Captain Kim is no longer inside it.”

Another pause. “We’re all going to die,” Chian said.

Juwon sighed and got ready to radio back to Seoul’s air traffic control to ask them to advise him on the recommended course of action. At least he was finally the captain, even if only for the brief flight back to Seoul. Preparing to explain the inexplicable to a disbelieving audience, Juwon took a moment to mutter to himself, “All systems go, Captain.”

* * *

“My mother just disappeared,” said the gray-haired woman at the main desk of Scotland Yard.

Maggie nodded and got out a report form to start taking down the woman’s details. “When did you last see her?”

“We were sitting at the dining table. She was saying grace before supper.”

“And has she ever wandered off before?”

“She didn’t wander off,” the woman clarified. “She _disappeared_. Right into thin air.”

Maggie’s interest was piqued. She stayed up late most nights watching paranormal investigation programs and SF B-movies on the telly. She was a True Believer. As a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, such casual disregard for the standards of evidence might have set her back in her career. On the other hand, unlike most law-enforcement professionals, at least she had an imagination.

“Maybe it was, what do you call it, spontaneous human combustion,” Maggie suggested. She had seen a program about that just last week. It was something that especially happened to old ladies.***

“No, no,” the woman said. “There was no combustion of any sort. See, here’s her nightdress and her dentures. They were left behind in her chair. There are no burn marks.” She held up a pink satin nightdress and a jar of water in which a pair of dentures bobbed.

“Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?” Maggie said, exuding expertise. “That’s how you know it’s spontaneous human combustion. It burns the body but nothing else.”

“It happened right in front of me and there was no burning, all right? She just disappeared.” The woman looked vaguely around to see if there was perhaps someone else she could file her report with.

“Got another one, have we?” Tom said, having overheard the conversation. Tom was another sergeant, and he had just gotten off the phone at the desk.

“Another what?” Maggie asked.

“Another mysterious disappearance into thin air. We’ve gotten two other reports so far.”

“Aliens,” Maggie said, abandoning the spontaneous human combustion theory as easily as she had adopted it. “I mean, there’s no way there would be three spontaneous human combustions in the same city at the same time, right? That wouldn’t be very spontaneous. But alien abductions, that’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Ehh, we’ll see,” Tom said with an air of long-suffering skepticism. He was the Scully to Maggie’s Mulder.

“You know what this feels like?” Maggie said, getting properly excited now. “You know how in every movie about some sort of global catastrophe, there’s a sequence early on with scenes from all over the world to illustrate the global nature of the crisis? This sort of feels like that.”

* * *

*No one takes irony that far. Not even in Brooklyn.

**As the old joke goes, what’s the difference between God and a pilot? Answer: God doesn’t think he’s a pilot.

***And never to people who are out in public or anywhere in the vicinity of a camera.


	2. Chapter 2

“Have you seen the news?” Newt asked, sticking his head out of the back door of Jasmine Cottage. Aziraphale and Crowley had taken up their usual position in the garden, enjoying the warm summer evening, a bottle of wine, and the crushing sense of impending doom that had occupied their every moment since the merger of Heaven and Hell was announced the month before.

“Is it another one of Elon Musk’s tweets?” Crowley asked. “Because I told you before, he’s fully human, no matter how unlikely it seems —”

“No, it’s not that,” Newt said. “I’m pretty sure it’s for real this time. This is something you’ll proooobably want to see.”

Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged a worried look and got up to go inside the cottage. It had been quiet. Too quiet, as they say. They had rather expected that, after the merger of Heaven and Hell, the human world would have changed in ways that were difficult to miss. They had assumed that this was the start of the big one, the end of the world for real this time, all of Us versus all of Them. Instead, the human world had seemingly gone about its business as normal. All around them were humans living, dying, falling in love and making other poor decisions, just as they always had. Aziraphale and Crowley had stayed in the cottage during the intervening month, to Newt and Anathema’s mingled relief and frustration.* During that time, all four of them had monitored the news for any sign that things were about to go pear-shaped. Newt had displayed a tendency to over-interpret all new developments, from an earthquake in China to a political scandal in America, as bad omens. Aziraphale and Crowley had had to insist that there was no significance in such everyday occurrences. What they were looking for, they had no idea. But they felt that they would know it when they saw it.

As soon as Crowley saw what was on the telly, he knew that this was the _it_ that they would know when they saw. “ _Reports have now come in from over eighty countries all over the world of individuals instantaneously disappearing, all at 19:41 GMT,_ ” the newscaster was saying. _“In all cases, the clothing of the disappeared person was left behind. The total reported count of the disappeared currently stands at just over one hundred thousand—”_

“The number will be 144,000 when all’s said and done,” Aziraphale said with a bemused air. “I hadn’t expected this, of all things.”

“And what is this, exactly?” Anathema said from the sofa, which she was trying to persuade Sage not to jump up and down on. “Because it sounds like—”

“The Rapture, yes,” Aziraphale confirmed.

“Isn’t it a bit late?” Crowley asked. “Shouldn’t it have happened six years ago with the rest of the Apocalypse?”

“It shouldn’t have happened at all,” Aziraphale said. “The classical belief is that it just refers to the most faithful believers gathering with Christ in Heaven. It’s mostly the American evangelicals who have interpreted 1 Thessalonians to take ‘meeting the Lord in the air’ literally. Only the Americans could be optimistic enough to believe that Heaven’s forces would take the time to pick people out and pop them in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning Earth beneath them. And only the Americans would think that was morally acceptable. Even among the denominations who believe in a physical Rapture, they differ on its timing. Some hold that the faithful will be bodily taken to Heaven right before the seven-year Tribulation that precedes the End Times. Still others maintain that the faithful will be raptured only after the Tribulation, which will culminate in the Second Coming of Christ.”

“But we stopped it,” Crowley said. “That whole business was only supposed to happen following the ministry of the Antichrist. And we know he’s not doing much ministering these days.** So no Antichrist, no Second Coming, no Tribulation, no Rapture. Right?”

“Well, we know that Heaven and Hell have thrown out the rulebook. They must have some other plan.”

They all stared at the telly in silence. _“I want to assure our viewers,”_ the newscaster was saying, _“that we will bring on some experts to explain what is going on as soon as we identify what sort of experts are needed.”_

“Maybe they’re trying to restart the Apocalypse?” Newt suggested. “Give it another go because the first one didn’t take?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Crowley said, frustrated. “The Apocalypse was supposed to be the final showdown between Above and Below. Now that they’re working together, there’s no need for that kind of war. The casualties on both sides would be too great.”

“And anyway, the Rapture by itself doesn’t start the Apocalypse,” Aziraphale said. “Even to those who believed it would happen, it’s not a causal event, just a sideshow. Its only purpose would be as a bit of a favor to the most devout humans, giving them an out so they wouldn’t have to suffer through the End Times here on Earth. That’s why most serious scholars didn’t think it would really happen. It’s not like Upstairs to be merciful, not even to the most righteous humans.” His voice held a world of bitterness.

“Yeah, there’s no way they did this out of mercy,” Crowley said. “They’ve got some other endgame in mind.” He got out and stalked back out to the garden. After a moment, Aziraphale followed him. Newt and Anathema stayed inside the cottage to put the children to bed.

Crowley refilled the wine bottle they had left outside. He took a sip and then handed the bottle to Aziraphale. “Why 144,000?” Crowley asked.

“Oh, it’s one of those numerology things. I’ve never really had a head for figures, myself. If I recall correctly, it’s because 12 is the number for totality, which you then square and multiply by one thousand for some reason. Never understood the maths on that.”

“Even if you take at face value the claim that rapturing them is supposed to be a reward for the faithful, that number is a drop in the bucket compared to the total population of humanity. I mean, there have to be way more believers than that***.”

“Yes, but at the time Revelation was written, there were far fewer humans than there are today. And it’s not as though they adjust Biblical prophecies for population growth.”

“Hmm.” Crowley took out his phone and scrolled through the news. “Well, reports are saying that all the people who disappeared were highly devout. Many of them were engaging in religious acts during or shortly before their disappearance. Preaching, praying, proselytizing, being judgmental, that sort of thing.”

“That is consistent with the Rapture. Only the most faithful are taken up.” Aziraphale took a morose sip of wine from the bottle.

“So those 144,000 people are, what, now? Dead?”

“Yes and no. Their souls are in Heaven. But unlike most souls who enter, they were allowed to bring their bodies with them.”

“Why? What do they need bodies† for in Heaven?”

“Goodness, I don’t know.” Aziraphale thought for a moment. “I suppose we should do some research on the Rapture, see if we can figure out what Above is up to. I have some books back at the shop that might be useful.”

“Meh,” Crowley said unenthusiastically. “Can’t you just use Wikipedia like everyone else?”

“You know perfectly well I don’t know what that is. Anyway, there’s no reason we can’t make a day trip to London. Above and Below already know where we are. If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead. It’s like Gabriel and Beelzebub told us. They want us alive for whatever’s coming next.”

“They _said_ they want us alive. Seems like the sort of thing they’d say to lull us into a false sense of security.”

“Somehow I think they have bigger things going on right now than the two of us. But if it will make you feel better, maybe we can bring Adam with us.”

“Great, bringing a teenage Antichrist bodyguard with us wherever we go,” Crowley muttered. But he sent Adam a text regardless.

Crowley had to admit that Aziraphale had a point. Their continued existence was testament to the fact the newly merged Above-Below complex‡ had not made destroying them a priority. Their ostensible reason for staying in Tadfield all this time was because there they were in the relative safety of the Antichrist’s still terrifyingly powerful aura. They weren’t sure if Above and Below knew that Adam’s powers had subsided since he resigned from being the Antichrist, but either way Tadfield seemed like the safest place to be. It was also where their human allies were, so it made sense to circle the wagons and hole up there. But, if Crowley were being entirely honest, not something he was inclined to be, he would have had to concede that these were not his primary motivations for hanging around Tadfield. The last time they had been in the bookshop, Aziraphale had almost been consumed by hellfire. When Crowley thought of the bookshop now, all he could think of were flames and smoke. It was the last place he wanted to go, especially now that things were starting to heat up, so to speak.

Adam texted back that he was up for a trip to London tomorrow. “You can check in on your plants while we’re there,” Aziraphale said enticingly.

“All right, all right,” Crowley said. “We’ll go.”

Aziraphale beamed happily at the prospect of seeing his beloved bookshop again. Crowley acknowledged that, regardless of his own feelings on the matter, the trip was necessary. They had to figure out the significance of the unexpected Rapture and how exactly it fit into the larger theme of them, and humanity, being completely buggered.

* * *

*Relief, because Newt and Anathema figured that, if this really was the big one, the angel and demon were probably useful people to have around. Frustration, because Crowley had resumed being a bad influence on their already diabolically inclined three-year-old daughter, Sage. In their latest game, he had taught her to throw her voice low, roll her eyes up, and recite satanic verses in her toddler speech. The effect was impressively creepy, and Sage had quickly learned that she could get whatever she wanted out of her parents through judicious application of the technique.

**Adam had cooked up a plan to skip his last year of school and go join Greenpeace on an occupation of an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea. He would have left already, he said, except he felt a responsibility to hang around Tadfield for the summer to see what happened with this whole Heaven-Hell merger.

***This was something Crowley had learned through his millennia of experience of tempting humans. There was a small percentage of humanity who were so eager to be led into sin that they essentially threw themselves into it as if sin were a nice cool swimming pool on a hot day. Crowley had never enjoyed working with that sort because there was no challenge in it. A much larger percentage, the majority of all people, could be swayed into temptation if you were skillful enough to hit them with just the right appeal at just the right time. But there was still the remainder, a sizable proportion of humanity, who were so thoroughly decent as to be incorruptible. Among demons, such good people are known as lemons.

†Most of the fun things you can do with a body are either expressly forbidden in Heaven or are frowned upon.

‡Some of the demons in Hell’s marketing department had tried to develop a catchier name for the newly merged organization. The best they had been able to come up with was Helleaven, which needless to say had not caught on.


	3. Chapter 3

“I have a Porsche Nine Eleven,” Zach said. He took a casual sip of his Starbucks coffee and raised his eyebrows at Brittany, seeking her comment.

“That’s a – really nice car, right?” As a native Manhattanite, Brittany was only familiar with cars as part of the background scenery, not as objects that one could actually interact with.

“You could say that,” Zach said smugly. He swiped his phone to a photo of said really nice car, shoving it in her face until she made vaguely impressed sounds. The car looked like the metallic equivalent of a swimsuit model, all sexy curves. “Of course,” Zach went on, “I have a Porsche 718 Cayman too—”

Brittany tuned him out. It seemed like her responsibility as a woman to do so. She was already regretting taking another swing at the erratically bouncing ping-pong ball that was online dating. After her date of the day before had disappeared as part of what the news was calling the Rapture, she had taken it as a sign and considered canceling today’s date with Zach. But again, the app had lured her in with promises of compatibility with regard to personality and astrology, not to mention that Zach had also looked smoking hot in his profile pic. In retrospect, she realized that he must have used some sort of douchebag-removal filter in the photo. He was good-looking, yes, but in that repellant way of a guy who knows he’s good-looking and who ostentatiously invests in hair products and expensive clothing to emphasize just how good-looking. As if that weren’t bad enough, he apparently worked on Wall Street. The only way for someone his age to have already done well enough on Wall Street to have bought multiple sports cars was by being a first-rate douchebag.

Zach finally shut up about his Porsche. He shut up about it in the middle of a sentence about how the car went from zero to sixty in three seconds, and Brittany’s emotional state went from relieved to panicked in three seconds. That was because, in addition to shutting up, Zach had also suddenly dropped his phone and was now staring vacantly, cross-eyed, drool dripping from the corner of his mouth.

“Holy shit,” Brittany said. “Are you having a stroke or something?” She tried to remember what you were supposed to do for strokes. Keep them from biting their tongue? No, that was seizures.* Maybe this was a seizure?

Suddenly, Zach stood up and flipped the table over, sending the coffee cups flying. Brittany shrieked and scrambled backward out of reach. Zach lifted his arms horizontally out in front of him and began staggering toward her in a shambling fashion like a background dancer from the “Thriller” music video, albeit with much less rhythm.

The rest of the Starbucks had taken notice by now, and apparently Brittany was not the only one who was reminded of “Thriller.” “It’s a zombie!” someone yelled. The Starbucks emptied itself out as quickly as if the wifi had gone down.

Fleeing along with the rest of the Starbucks patrons, it occurred to Brittany that maybe, just maybe, this was the universe shouting at her to give up on this online dating thing once and for all. At the thought, all she felt was a sense of freedom. As soon as she got a couple of blocks away, she spared a moment amid the general chaos that had enveloped Times Square to take out her phone, highlight the dating app, and firmly press _delete_.

* * *

“All systems go, Captain,” Juwon said. After being diverted to Seoul the previous day after the alleged Rapture, his flight, along with most others around the world, had been grounded while the authorities tried to determine the impact of these new developments on aviation safety. Eventually, the authorities had shrugged and said, well, what’s raptured is raptured, and those of us left behind still have places to go, so might as well get on with it. As a precaution, most aviation-regulating agencies around the world had issued recommendations that every cockpit contain at least one pilot who didn’t meet any of the standard criteria for Rapture risk, in the unlikely event there were any stragglers. As an atheist, Juwon already knew he was in no danger of being raptured. Captain Park, whom Juwon was flying with now, also seemed to be un-rapturable, if the rumors of his infidelities and gambling addiction were true.

“Well, let’s get this bird in the air then,” Captain Park said, putting away his phone with an air of such guilt that Juwon could only assume that he had been indulging one or more of his vices. Juwon decided that he liked flying with Captain Park much better than he had liked flying with Captain Kim.

It was once again shortly after they had reached their cruising altitude that something unexpected once again happened. This time, it was a commotion from the cabin. Commotions are never good things to have on a plane, but if you’re going to have one, it’s better to have it in the cabin than the cockpit.

“What is going on back there?” Captain Park wondered aloud. “You think someone reclined their seat while sitting in front of someone who really doesn’t want to be reclined on?”

“Could be, sir.” That sort of thing happened often enough.**

Captain Park tried ringing the private line to the head flight attendant, but she didn’t answer. Based on the sounds of shouting, she likely had her hands full.

After a few minutes, Chian the flight attendant finally called in to the cockpit. “We’ve got a bit of a situation back here, Captain,” she said. Situations were even worse things than commotions to have on a plane.

“What is it?” Captain Park asked.

“One of the passengers in business class went berserk,” Chian said.

“Is that all?” Captain Park sounded relieved. It was an everyday occurrence for passengers to go berserk. It was a wonder that, over the course of a twelve-hour intercontinental flight, the majority of passengers did not go berserk.

“Well, it was the way he went berserk,” Chian said. She sounded uncertain, which was not the way she usually sounded. She was the type of person who could subdue a berserk passenger without disturbing her perfectly styled hair or her perfectly styled smile. That was the sort of person you had to be to be an effective flight attendant.

“Yes?” Captain Park prompted her.

“The consensus is that he appears to have turned into a zombie. With the help of some of the passengers, we managed to restrain him.” Chian’s normal steely tone was back, and Juwon could imagine Chian personally tying up a zombie with the cheery neckerchief the flight attendants wore as part of their uniform. “But I think,” Chian went on, “that it might be a good idea to return to Seoul, Captain.”

“All right, I’ll radio air traffic control to apprise them of the situation,” Captain Park said grimly.

Juwon sighed. It looked like Korean Air flight 468 was never going to make it to Los Angeles. Despite his best efforts, all systems were definitely not go.

* * *

“It’s the zombie apocalypse,” Maggie said, unable to disguise her delight. This was the moment she had been waiting for all her life.

“No, it isn’t,” Tom said, narrowly dodging a zombie that had shuffled in front of their police car. They had been driving through central London on patrol when they had been forced to notice that there were a lot of people acting rather oddly, and that most of the other people were reacting in abject terror.

“What else could it be?”

“Some sort of disease?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s always some sort of disease that turns people into zombies.”

“They’re not even proper zombies,” Tom said, pulling over to the side of the street to gesture at one of the non-proper zombies ambling its way down the sidewalk while bystanders fled in terror. “Don’t zombies bite people to make them into zombies too? I haven’t seen these ones try to bite anyone.”

_“All units, this is dispatch,”_ said a nonplussed voice through the radio. _“We are aware of the strange behavior that many of our citizens have suddenly decided to engage in. Please stand by for instructions.”_

“What do they expect us to do, arrest them?” Tom asked Maggie. “All they’re doing is shuffling around making groaning noises. That’s not illegal, is it?”

“They’re _zombies_ ,” Maggie said.

“Well, even if they are, there’s no law against being a zombie, is there?”***

Maggie thought about that. “It’s against the laws of nature.”

“Seems a bit intolerant to me. Might lead to some civil rights complaints later.”

“Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be arresting them. We’ll be fighting to save the world from them.” In preparation, Maggie reflected on the dozens of zombie movies she had seen. She had always known, deep down, that she was preparing for a day just like this. “Hey,” she said as a thought occurred to her. “I wonder if we’re the heroes, or just the poor sods dying in the background?”

* * *

*In fact, that’s not something you should do for seizures either. Don’t worry about the tongue, they’ve got other problems.

**Some researchers theorize that the reason that airline seats are made to recline is solely to enlist passengers as unwilling participants in some long-running psychological experiment. Other researchers go further and hypothesize that the reason for the entire airline industry is solely to enlist passengers as unwilling participants in some long-running psychological experiment.

***It is true that there is no law against being a zombie, but in Haiti there is a law against making a zombie.


	4. Chapter 4

“You’re not bringing that dog in my car,” Crowley said. He and Aziraphale had driven the Bentley over to Adam’s house to pick up the former Antichrist on their way to London. Adam had been out in his front garden, accompanied as always by Dog.

“Dog goes everywhere with me,” Adam said obstinately. “You want me to come with you to London and spend the whole day in a boring bookshop, fine. But I’m not going without Dog.”

The demon and teenager glared at each other in the age-old standoff between an irresistible force and an immovable object. Aziraphale sighed, realizing it was down to him to break the stalemate.

“Here,” he said, waving a blanket into existence on the backseat. “That will keep all the dog hairs and slobber off.”

Crowley shook his head. “It’s the smell. It still smells of dog in here after the last ride we took from London. There’s something about that smell that just permeates everything.”

“Well, then it won’t do any more harm, since the smell’s already permeated everything,” Aziraphale pointed out reasonably. Crowley turned his glare on him, and Aziraphale decided to pull out the big guns. “Please, Crowley,” he said, making his eyes wide and beseeching.

Crowley wilted in defeat, issuing a gruff, “Fine. Let’s get on with it then.”

“Can I drive?” Adam asked, brightening up.

“Adam, please don’t push it,” Aziraphale said quickly before Crowley could explode.

The drive to London was uneventful. Upon arrival in the city, Crowley made a stop at his flat. Aziraphale waited in the car with Adam and Dog while Crowley went in to check on the condition of his plants. Upon return, Crowley looked to be in a better mood, reporting that his indoor jungle had thrived despite his absence. Aziraphale wondered whether _because of_ would be a more accurate term than _despite_ , but he knew better than to say anything.

They pulled up in front of the bookshop, where Crowley’s secret parking spot revealed itself upon their approach. The air inside the shop was musty from the unattended books. Adam immediately settled down with Dog on the sofa, taking out his phone and already looking bored.

“Let me see,” Aziraphale said, going up to a shelf. “I’ve got original editions of most of the premillennial dispensationalists here – Eusebius, Joachim of Fiore, Francisco Ribera…”

“Sounds like great beach reading,” Crowley muttered.

They both dug into the texts, Aziraphale with considerably more enthusiasm than Crowley. There was a bewildering variety of perspectives on whether, when, and how the Rapture was supposed to happen. As he read, what became increasingly clear to Aziraphale was that none of these scholars and theologians had any idea of what they were talking about.

“All right,” Crowley said late in the afternoon. Across the room, Adam was trying to teach Dog to sit on command, an endeavor that seemed as hopeless as their own quest to make sense of Biblical prophecies. “The consensus seems to be,” Crowley said, “that there is no consensus. It all goes back to 1 Thessalonians, to that phrase _we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them_ – with the dead in Christ – _in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air_. That’s it. Not much to go on.”

“No,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully. “It’s like a lot of things in the Bible, left vague enough that you can interpret it any way you choose. Almost like they were leaving different options open.”

Crowley looked up. “Different options,” he repeated. “So, basically, Above didn’t _have_ to physically Rapture anyone, especially since we averted the Apocalypse, which made it a bit of a moot point. But they’ve always had the _option_ to do it.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, getting on the same wavelength. “So the question is, why are they doing it now? Why recall 144,000 faithful souls to Heaven, right after the merger with Hell?”

“What’s in it for them?” Crowley asked. He stared broodingly back down at his book. “I don’t think we’re going to find any answers in here. Maybe we should—”

He broke off as there was a sudden ruckus from the street outside the shop. Police sirens wailing, people screaming, glass breaking.

“What on earth?” Aziraphale asked worriedly, getting up to go peek outside. Dog had broken off from his unsuccessful obedience training lesson and was standing alert, floppy ears perked up, tail wagging adorably but in a more cautious than usual manner.

“Wait,” Crowley said, stopping Aziraphale with a hand on his arm. “Let me look.”

“Why?”

“Just stay back, all right?” Crowley snapped. Aziraphale could see through the irritability to the worry underneath, so he acquiesced.

Crowley opened the door just a crack, then immediately fell back as a human form stumbled against him. “Nguh,” Crowley said in surprise and disgust. Aziraphale understood why. There was something deeply unsettlingly about the human who had just blundered into the bookshop, its eyes unseeing, walking like something that was imitating a human after having human locomotion described to it. It was a deeply, terrifyingly, empty thing.

“Whoa,” Adam said, following the first instinct of every teenager, which was to film a video of the encounter with his phone.* Crowley retreated back against the far wall of the bookshop in a very undignified way, seeking to put as much distance between him and the human-shaped thing as possible. Aziraphale felt himself frozen in place, unable to react with anything other than existential dread.

Out of all of them, it was only Dog who had a courageous and quick-thinking reaction. He ran across the bookshop floor, yapping in what he probably believed to be a threatening manner, and sunk his teeth into the thing’s leg. The thing did not seem bothered by or aware of the small dog that had firmly attached itself, but Dog’s actions shook Aziraphale out of his stupor. He waved his hand, and zip-ties appeared around the thing’s wrists and ankles. The thing attempted to take another step regardless, crashing over onto the floor where it lay on its side, making horrid wordless moaning sounds all the while.

“What in the name of—” Crowley asked, dazed.

“It’s a zombie,” Adam said, still filming on his phone. “Obviously.”

“Put that thing away,” Crowley growled, and Adam reluctantly obeyed. “It’s not a zombie.”

“Well, it sort of is,” Aziraphale disagreed. “It’s an animate human body with no soul.” That was what he and Crowley had sensed that was so disturbing. The thing looked like a human, and it had been one once, but there was no one home. Angels and demons were finely attuned to the presence of human souls, seeing as the fate of those souls was their stock in trade. Some of those souls were bright, some were tarnished, some were clear, some were clouded, but they were always _there_.** To see a living human body with no soul attached was unnerving, to say the least. It was even unnerving to the humans outside, who didn’t know what was wrong but sensed viscerally that something was, which explained the general pandemonium in the streets.

“Cool,” Adam said, staring in horrified fascination. Dog, apparently having changed his mind about the thing and decided that it was his friend, was licking the thing’s face excitedly.

“No, it’s not cool,” Aziraphale said. “It’s an abomination. This – this shouldn’t even be possible.”

“Is it dead?” Adam asked, tentatively prodding the thing’s still-writhing body with the toe of his trainer.

“Not exactly,” Crowley said. “You can live without your soul, although not very well, apparently. Your soul is what gives you your sense of identity and values and all that. Seems that it’s also what gives you the ability to talk and walk in a straight line and keep from drooling all over yourself.”

“There must be something we can do for this poor creature,” Aziraphale said. He tentatively reached his hand out, to try to feel if there was anything his healing energy could enter, but Crowley stopped him again.

“There’s not. Its soul is gone. It’s worse than dead.” His voice was sharp, but his touch was gentle on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

Adam had cautiously stuck his head out the door. “There’s more of them outside,” he reported.

“Let’s go back to Tadfield,” Crowley said. “London is the last place to be when there’s zombies, or whatever, running around. Do you want to bring any of these books back with you, or are they all as useless as they seem?”

“They’re not useless,” Aziraphale objected automatically, and selected as many volumes to bring with him as the three of them could carry. Despite his words, he didn’t think they’d really be very useful for their current situation, but he just couldn’t bear leaving them all behind in a zombie-ravaged city.

Crowley rolled his eyes when Aziraphale handed him a heavy stack of books to lug, but he lugged them regardless. They made their way out to the Bentley as quickly as possible and deposited their small library into its boot. “Just a moment,” Aziraphale said, and ran back inside the shop.

Crowley followed. “Aziraphale, we don’t have room for any more books,” he said.

“I know. I just –I couldn’t leave him here.” Aziraphale started dragging the bound zombie outside.

“It’s not a person anymore,” Crowley said in exasperation. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll just leave him outside. Maybe someone will come along and help him.”

“If you really want to help, best thing to do would be to put it out of its misery.”

Aziraphale hesitated. He considered it, but only for a moment. “I can’t. Besides, maybe the humans will come up with some sort of cure for this. You know how clever they are.”

Crowley made a doubtful noise, but he didn’t say anything else. Instead, he helped Aziraphale drag the zombie out to the sidewalk and lean it, as comfortably as they could manage, against the side of the building.

“I am sorry for what’s happened to you,” Aziraphale murmured to the zombie.

Crowley’s hand came down on Aziraphale’s shoulder again. “Let’s go, angel.”

Navigating the London streets was a nail-biting experience. Every so often, a zombie would stumble into the street in front of the car. The first time it happened, Crowley seemed intent on running the thing down, but Aziraphale’s cry made him veer off course just in the nick of time.

“I’d be doing it a favor,” Crowley snapped.

“Just, please, don’t hit them, all right?” Aziraphale begged. “I don’t want you to.”

“Fine.” After that, Crowley navigated carefully around any wayward zombies.

In addition to the occasional zombie, they had to contend with the panicked fleeing humans who were still burdened with souls, crashed and abandoned cars lining the streets, and confused-looking emergency response personnel who all agreed that this was an emergency but were undecided on what the response should be. It was a relief to reach the M25, which seemed relatively unscathed by the zombie apocalypse.*** Once they left London, Crowley flipped on the radio.

“I want to hear the news,” he said. “And maybe if we’re lucky, the infernal airwaves will break in and Above and Below will threaten us some more. They always do that supervillain speech thing where they reveal the details of their evil plan, and I could use a bloody hint right about now.”

All they heard were the normal airwaves, but their content was no less disturbing. _“This is a fast-moving news story, and we will of course endeavor to bring you the latest updates, no matter how barmy they sound,”_ the BBC broadcaster was saying. _“That is our professional duty as journalists, and it is one we take seriously. Here’s what we know so far. At 17:22 GMT, in over one hundred countries all around the world, what is estimated as tens of millions of people suddenly began exhibiting unusual and disturbing behavior. This includes nonverbal moaning, a shambling gait, and non-responsiveness to any attempt to communicate. We must stress that, so far, we have received no confirmed reports of these individuals causing intentional harm to anyone, although some car crashes and other incidents have occurred. This, after yesterday’s sudden unexplained disappearance of 144,000 other individuals. And to think that this started off as a slow news week.”_ The broadcaster laughed, a bit hysterically. _“Some are calling yesterday’s events the Rapture and today’s the zombie apocalypse, but of course we’re the BBC and we don’t go in for sensationalistic nonsense like that. Right, Caroline?”_

_“That’s right, Simon,”_ said the co-host with an equal amount of barely suppressed mania. _“As the BBC, it is our duty to assure the public that there is most certainly a reasonable explanation for all this, which we will be sharing with you as soon as someone has told us what it is. In the meantime, let’s review some additional facts that have come in. We’ve just received a report of some high-profile individuals who have allegedly fallen victim to this bizarre affliction. Disturbingly, this list includes several heads of state and other political leaders, CEOs of major international corporations, and A-list celebrities. Here is a partial list…”_

They listened to the list. There were a lot of familiar names on it.

“Wait a minute,” Crowley said suddenly. “I know that one.” After a moment, “That one too. And both of those ones.”

“When you say _know_ ,” Aziraphale asked, “do you mean…”

“Yes, I tempted them.” Crowley rolled his eyes at the disapproving look Aziraphale gave him. “It was years ago, and that was my job at the time, as you well know. But listen, even the people on that list who I didn’t personally tempt, I know they were priorities Downstairs. I heard some of them were reached by colleagues back when I was still on the payroll. Others might have been gotten to in the last few years, when I wasn’t in the loop anymore.”

“So you’re saying that all the zombies were most likely people who had been tempted by Hell.”

“Exactly. They sold their souls. That’s why so many of them were rich and famous and successful. I bet even the ordinary sods, like the one who broke into the bookshop, were driving nice cars and had their own petty tyrannies to rule over. Those are the fruits of signing up with Down Below.”

“But humans have been selling their souls to Hell ever since the Fall of Man. That just means that they go Down Below when they die. It doesn’t mean that Hell can collect their souls while they’re still alive.”

“But it doesn’t mean they can’t.” Crowley’s voice took on an excited tone. “Hell’s lawyers are genius at soul contracts. It wouldn’t be a challenge for them to put in a stipulation that says that Hell can collect on its contracts at any time of its choosing.”

“Sort of like the Biblical prophecies. There was no requirement that a bodily Rapture take place, but also nothing to prevent it.”

“Right. Both Above and Below were hedging their bets. Above had 144,000 devout human souls who were promised to them in an ambiguous Biblical revelation, and they could recall them to Heaven at any time. And Below had a much greater number of wicked souls who signed contracts with them, and again they had the option to drag them off to Hell any time they please.”

“But why now?”

“Isn’t it obvious? They’re liquidating human souls. That’s pretty much what Beelzebub and Gabriel told us they were planning with the merger. They’re stepping up production of souls to the industrial scale, because human souls are what power Heaven and Hell. Before, they had to keep the flow of souls fairly steady, because if either Above or Below took in too many all at once, the other would respond in kind. But now, after the merger, there’s a monopoly on souls. Above and Below can work together to maximize the transfer of souls from Earth. It’s All of Us versus All of Them.”

Aziraphale frowned. “They can’t completely liquidate human souls. If they killed off all the humans, there would be no new souls. As you said, it’s the influx of human souls that powers Heaven and Hell.”

“Who says they’re killing them off entirely? They’re just increasing production massively above what it was before. They’ve taken all the low-hanging fruit, all the souls that already belonged to either Above or Below. So now all the most devout souls have been raptured to Heaven and all the most corrupted souls have been taken to Hell, but there’s still all the ordinary humans, the ones who are neither very good nor very bad, left on the Earth to make babies and replenish the supply of new souls indefinitely.”

“But if they’re increasing the influx of souls to make Heaven and Hell more powerful, the ones they’ve already taken won’t be enough. 144,000, or even tens of millions, is a tiny fraction of all the human souls that have ever lived. They’re going to need many more souls than that.”

“Yes, which means killing a bunch of the ordinary humans.” Crowley’s voice was grim. “The ones who are left haven’t yet promised their souls to either Above or Below, so Heaven and Hell have no claim on them. Those souls can’t go anywhere until they die.”

“So the next step will be some sort of mass-casualty event.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes.

“Like a tsunami?” Adam piped up from the backseat, where he had been listening to the conversation with interest. “Or a massive storm?”

“More like an asteroid impact,” Crowley said. “We’re talking worldwide devastation with a death toll in the billions, not some local disaster that kills a few hundred thousand people.”

“So nuclear Armageddon, like they tried to do last time?” Adam suggested. “Or global warming? Or running out of food? Or disease?”

“Yeah, something along those lines,” Crowley said absently.

“Heaven and Hell don’t have the power to create those global calamities on their own,” Aziraphale said. “The Almighty does, but as far as we know, She’s sitting this one out. To create mass destruction through war, or famine, or pollution or pestilence, Above and Below contract that out.”

“To the Horsemen.” Crowley appeared lost in thought, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “That’s it. That’s how we can get all this sorted.”

“By fighting the Horsemen? We’d have a better chance facing Heaven and Hell directly. Which is to say, no chance, but you know what I mean.”

“We don’t need to fight them,” Crowley said, an insane grin appearing on his face. “We don’t even need to worry about all four of them. There’s only one we need.”

“You don’t mean…” Aziraphale always got nervous when he saw that insane grin on Crowley’s face.

“We need to have a word with Death.”

* * *

*All around the world, millions of other teenagers were doing the exact same thing, and the hashtag #ZOMG!Zombies had already gone viral. As far as zombie apocalypses went, this would be a very well-documented one.

**For reasons that have long mystified gastro-theologians, each human soul also has a unique taste associated with it. Some examples are cherry cola, a twist of lemon, rotten eggs, or whiskey that someone has extinguished a cigar in.

***It had been through far worse.


	5. Chapter 5

“Have you seen the news?” Newt greeted Aziraphale and Crowley upon their return to the cottage, after they had dropped Adam and Dog off. Newt had been glued to the telly, watching footage of the slapstick horror of zombies tripping over things and walking into things*, all the way from San Francisco to Sydney. 

“We were living it, Pulsifer,” Crowley said dismissively as he and Aziraphale headed out to their usual spot in the back garden. Anathema and the children were already out there, enjoying the evening air. Anathema had taken the zombie apocalypse into stride, but her stride had always been much more accommodating than Newt’s.

“I mean, zombies?” Newt asked as he followed them out, spreading his arms wide in an _am I right?_ gesture. “What kind of apocalypse is this?”

“It’s not an apocalypse,” Aziraphale said glumly, wine already in hand. “It’s something much worse.”

Newt and Anathema listened as the angel and demon explained that the newly merged Heaven-Hell complex was planning to kill off most humans and strip-mine their souls to keep the lights on Above and Below. They were interrupted several times by Sage shambling across the lawn with her arms held out, screeching “I’m a zombie!”**

“So that’s all we are to your former employers?” Newt asked, indignant on behalf of his fellow humans. “We’re just a bunch of alkaline batteries*** for you to run your empires on, like in the Matrix?”

“Makes sense to me,” Anathema said. “That is largely consistent with my understanding of the world we live in.”

“I remember you said that once,” Newt said to Crowley. “That human souls were just chips in the high-stakes poker game between Above and Below. At the time, I thought you were exaggerating. But that’s really what our souls are, isn’t it? All our lives, we’ve had one side trying to lead us to salvation and the other to temptation, but that’s not for our own benefit. It’s because whoever ends up with the most chips wins.”

“Right,” Crowley said. “And now all the chips are being cashed in. And you lot are the ones who lose.”

“What do you mean, exactly, when you say human souls are what power Heaven and Hell?” Anathema asked as she bounced baby Rowan on her knee. “What kind of power do they need?”

“This kind,” Crowley said, manifesting a kangaroo because, for whatever reason, it was the first thing that came to his mind to manifest.

The kangaroo took a few hesitant hops, Aziraphale murmured, “Really, my dear,” and Crowley returned the kangaroo to wherever it had come from.†

“You use our souls,” Newt said accusingly, “to do _that_?”

“What of it?” Crowley said. “We have the power to manipulate the earthly realm, and that power comes from earthly human souls that feed Heaven and Hell, respectively.”

“So if there were no human souls,” Anathema said, “what would happen to all the angels and demons? Would you all just disappear?”

“No,” Aziraphale said. “The Almighty One created us to be eternal. Heaven and Hell would still be there, and all of us too. But our power would be greatly diminished. We would no longer be able to do miracles on the material plane.”

“Well, why would you need to?” Anathema asked. “If there were no humans?”

Aziraphale and Crowley frowned at each other. Newt felt a surge of pride in his wife at having asked a question that stumped the angel and demon.

“Yeah,” Newt joined in. “It’s sort of an absurd loop, isn’t it? Heaven and Hell only need to be able to do miracles to win human souls, but they only need to be able to win human souls in order to do miracles.”

“Well, that’s bureaucracy for you,” Crowley said, but he sounded concerned about this gap in logic.

“It’s a good question,” Aziraphale said. “The power Heaven and Hell get from human souls is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. There must be some larger end we can’t see.”

“So we need to see the bigger picture,” Crowley said, sounding as though he was picking up an argument he and the angel had temporarily left off. “This is why we need to have a chat with Death.”

“Wait, what?” Newt asked, feeling that he had missed something.

Aziraphale looked frustrated. “Crowley believes that the only way for us to find out what’s going on and figure out a way to resolve it is to speak with Death himself.”

“Er, why Death?” Newt asked.

“Because,” Crowley said, “he’s the one who ships off all the departing human souls to either Above or Below. He’s got his finger on the pulse, in a manner of speaking, on the day-to-day operations of soul processing. He has to know what’s going on.”

“Why would you think he’d cooperate?” Anathema asked. Newt thought that was a reasonable question. While he didn’t know Death personally, he didn’t have a reputation for being helpful.

“I don’t, necessarily. But I have a feeling that he’s just as hacked off at what Above and Below are doing as we are. It’s got to bother him that they’re monkeying around with souls. Say what you will about Death, he’s a professional.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Newt said. “Might as well give it a go. Not like we’ve got any better ideas.”

“Only one problem with that,” Aziraphale said through gritted teeth. “We have no way of contacting Death.”

“Well, where is he?” Newt asked.

“Everywhere,” Aziraphale said. Newt took an uneasy look around the blooming garden, glowing golden in the setting sun. “But that doesn’t help us,” Aziraphale added. “Unless he wants to make himself seen, only the recently deceased can see him.”

“Ah.” Newt could see how that would be a pretty insurmountable obstacle.

“We just need a way to see what the dead see,” Crowley said slowly. It sounded like a thought he had been rolling around in his mind, wearing it smooth.

“Maybe it would be enough to be brought to the brink of death?” Anathema suggested.

“Might be, but we’re immortal,” Crowley said, indicating himself and Aziraphale. “So there is no brink of death for us.”

“Excuse me,” Newt said. “Haven’t we recently helped save both of your lives? What is it you were on the brink of, if not death?”

“That’s different,” Crowley said, waving his hand. “There’s death and there’s death. Death – that’s Death with a capital D – usually only appears to mortals who’ve just died, in order to dispose of their souls. So what we need –” suddenly he was eyeing Newt with a speculative glint that Newt did not like at all – “is a _mortal_ on the brink of death.”

“No,” Newt said.

“It would just –”

“No,” Newt repeated.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale admonished.

“Fine.” Crowley looked mutinous. “I was only going to suggest the _brink_ of death,” he muttered to Aziraphale, who patted his arm understandingly.

“What about someone who’s already dying?” Anathema suggested.

“There would be no moral qualms with that,” Aziraphale said.

“Yes, but there’s all sorts of other qualms,” Crowley said. “For instance, what are we supposed to do? Go find some poor dying person and ask them if they would mind keeping an eye out for the cloaked skeleton with the scythe and give him a message for us? Oh, yeah, and even if Death answered our questions, we would have no way of ever hearing the answers, because our mortal messenger would only have a one-way ticket.”

“It’s like you said,” Anathema said thoughtfully. “We just need a way to _see_ what the dead see.”

The words seem to have triggered something in Crowley. “That’s right,” he said. “We just need to see what they see.” He grinned in a thoroughly unsettling way. “Who’s up for a bit of demonic possession?”

* * *

*A fun pastime some people had quickly invented was to turn a zombie in the direction of a pier or a building edge or a brick wall, then watch the results with glee.

**Hell had tasted that one’s soul and spat it back out.

***Technically, human souls are more like lithium-ion batteries. They are rechargeable, with a high energy density, but can also explode if improperly handled.

†It was immediately anointed by its peers as the kangaroo messiah, the one who had been raptured and then returned.


	6. Chapter 6

“It’s not happening,” Aziraphale shouted. “You’re not possessing a dying human.”

“I’ll possess whoever I damn well please,” Crowley shouted back.

Anathema sighed and poured herself another glass of wine from the bottle the angel and demon had abandoned in the midst of their shouting match. Newt sat beside her in the now-dark garden, also with a glass of wine. They had gone in to put the children to bed, then had come back out to find Aziraphale and Crowley still arguing, with no sign of losing steam. Figuring that they were going to hear the argument no matter where they were, Newt and Anathema had settled back outside in the garden so that they could at least have a good view.

“Look,” Aziraphale said, adopting the reasonable tone that people who began sentences with _Look_ invariably did. “It’s dangerous. Too dangerous. We can find another way—”

“How much of a bloody danger could I be?” Crowley snapped back. “They’re already dying—”

“Not for them,” Aziraphale interrupted. “I mean for you. Just think about it. What happens to you when the incorporation you’re inhabiting dies?”

“Oh,” Crowley said, finally running out of steam. Clearly, he had not understood the nature of Aziraphale’s objection to the idea. “Well, if was my incorporation that died, obviously I would return Down Below. Which obviously is less than ideal.” Aziraphale made a huffing sound. “But,” Crowley went on hurriedly, “in this case, my incorporation –” he waved a hand in front of his own face – “would just be sitting there, empty and waiting. Well, lying there, probably. Anyway, I hitch a ride with the unfortunate human to death’s doorstep, exchange a few words with the Grim Reaper, then float back to my waiting incorporation before any actual grim reaping occurs. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Where’s the problem?”

“You just said easy, peasy, lemon squeezy,” Aziraphale said darkly.

“Only because you’re making me nervous,” Crowley said. “Besides that, where’s the problem?”

Aziraphale appeared to be thinking hard about where the problem was. “Let me do it,” he finally said.

“You?” Crowley looked at him askance. “You couldn’t possess a fly.”

“Yes, I can. Remember Madame Tracy?”

Crowley scoffed. “Call that possession? You were sharing a body with a willing host like you were flatmates going halfsies on the rent. You even let her talk, much as everyone at the scene wished you wouldn’t. No, if this is going to work, the possessor has to fully take over the possessee’s mind. Can you even do that?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t try. Seems a bit rude.”

“Precisely. Much more my area than yours.” Aziraphale still looked unconvinced, so Crowley added, “If anything goes wrong, which it won’t, I’ll just zip back to my incorporation. No danger.”

“There’s still the matter of where we’re going to find a dying human for you to possess,” Aziraphale said, which Crowley seemed to accept as tacit endorsement of the overall plan.

“No problem,” Crowley said. “Dying humans are all over the place.” He swept his arm around to illustrate the sheer number of dying humans.

“Yes, but we need one who’s about to die at a predictable time so that you don’t have to hang around inside them for too long. And it also needs to be a controlled environment, so that we can keep your incorporation nearby.”

“How about a hospital?” Anathema spoke up. Both Aziraphale and Crowley spun to face her, having apparently been unaware that she and Newt were there. “You could possess someone who’s about to be taken off life support,” Anathema continued. “That way, you’ll only have to spend a few minutes in them before they kick it.”

“We could check Crowley in as a patient,” Newt added. “Then we can keep his incorporation in a bed nearby.”

“All right, you two can take care of those details, since that’s your area of expertise,” Aziraphale said, clearly unfamiliar with the concept of life support and not terribly interested in learning more. “Crowley, is there anything else you need to prepare from your end?”

“I’m not sure,” Crowley said, suddenly seeming a bit embarrassed.

“Well, what do you normally need to do to prepare for a possession?”

Crowley mumbled something underneath his breath.

“I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“I said I’ve never done it before, all right?” Crowley blurted out.

“Really?” Aziraphale looked surprised. “But all the demons were doing it in the seventeenth century. It was quite the craze.”

“I was never into that. I suppose I spend enough time around humans that the idea of seeing them from the inside wasn’t that appealing. It’s like how you don’t shine a blacklight on the bedsheets in your hotel room*, because if you did that, you’d never be able to stay in a hotel again.”

“I understand,” Aziraphale said. He sounded as though he was struggling not to laugh. “But if you’re really set on doing this, your first time can’t be in the hospital with a dying human. You need to practice.” Both he and Crowley turned to their human companions and eyed them up.

“No,” Newt said.

“It’ll just be—” Crowley began.

“No,” Newt repeated.

“I’ll make sure he—” Aziraphale tried.

“ _No_.”

“Do me,” Anathema volunteered.

“What?” Newt regarded her with horror.

“It sounds like an interesting experience, being possessed by a demon. Every occultist’s dream.”

“No,” Newt said, shaking his head. “I can’t stand by and watch a demon possess my wife. If you’re going to possess one of us, possess me.” Anathema found her husband’s chivalry mildly patronizing but also sweet, so she nodded in agreement.

“I’ll make sure he behaves himself,” Aziraphale said.

“Fine,” Newt said, looking like he was about to go to the dentist to get his teeth drilled. “I’m ready.”

Crowley stood in front of Newt and stared at him intensely.

“I said I’m ready,” Newt said impatiently. “Just do it already.”

“I’m trying,” Crowley snapped. “I’ve never done this before, remember?”

Aziraphale moved next to Crowley. “You’re trying too hard,” he said. “Just relax. Close your eyes.” Crowley used his eyes to glare at Aziraphale one more time before closing them. “Now,” Aziraphale went on. “You know that feeling of being disincorporated?”

“All too well.”

“It’s like that. Just let go of your incorporation and let yourself float free—"

Crowley suddenly toppled over, and Aziraphale lunged to catch his body and gently lower it to the ground. Newt had screwed his eyes shut in terror, but now he opened them. They were yellow, with a vertical slit.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale asked.

“Huh,” said Newt’s voice. What was unmistakably Crowley’s grin broke out on Newt’s face. “I’ve got a sudden craving for pea soup,” he announced. “Hey, I wonder how far I can spin this head around?”

“That’s enough, my dear,” Aziraphale said sternly. “Leave him alone now.”

“All right,” Newt’s voice said, a bit reluctantly. A moment later, Crowley was sitting up on the grass and Newt was blinking with his once again normal-looking eyes.

“Let’s do that again,” Crowley said as Aziraphale helped him to his feet. He looked as though he had enjoyed the experience.

“Let’s not,” Newt countered as Anathema squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. He looked as though he had not enjoyed the experience.

“I need more practice,” Crowley insisted.

“I need to clean my soul out with bleach**,” Newt insisted.

“How about this?” Aziraphale interjected. “We call it a night, then we practice again in the morning.”

Crowley and Newt both reluctantly accepted the compromise, and they all headed back inside the cottage. Newt and Anathema retreated to the privacy of their bedroom and started getting ready for bed. Every few minutes, Newt shook with a full-body shudder.

“You all right, love?” Anathema asked as they spooned together in bed.

“Yeah. It’s just a bit – unpleasant, that’s all. I can still feel it, like a hangover without all the fun of having been drunk.”

“I’ll let him practice on me in the morning,” Anathema said. “We can share the load.”

So the next morning, after breakfast, Anathema and Crowley faced each other, with him sitting on the sofa and her in an armchair. Crowley once again closed his eyes, and Anathema waited. Despite her outward calm as an interested occultist, she was a bit nervous, based on Newt’s description of the experience.

Quicker than he had managed it last night, Crowley was suddenly possessing her. It was a strange feeling and, as Newt had said, a bit unpleasant. She could feel Crowley’s presence in her mind. Despite him being a demon, it was not what she would describe as an evil presence, or even a malicious one. It was, however, a presence that was cold and ancient and deeply alien. The overall effect was like looking into the eyes of a snake.

Anathema could see Crowley’s temporarily vacated body slumped across the sofa, and Newt and Aziraphale were staring at her with curiosity.

“I wish there was a staircase,” Anathema heard her own voice say. “I’d walk down it backwards on my hands.” It was an odd sensation, saying words that were not her own, like riding in the backseat of your own car while someone else drives it. Suddenly, she very much wanted Crowley out of her head. He could do anything to her, make her do anything. It was the most powerless she had ever felt. Interesting occult experience or not, she wanted off the ride, now. But there was nothing she could do. She struggled against the possession, but her body was no longer her own.

Maybe Crowley could sense her struggle, or maybe he had just gotten bored. Either way, she felt him release her. Suddenly, she could move of her own volition again. Trembling, she raised her hands in front of her face, just to make sure she could. Across from her, Crowley was sitting up, back in his own body.

“You’re going to run out of _Exorcist_ references,” Anathema said to Crowley, mostly to reassure Newt, who looked concerned for her well-being, that she was all right.

Crowley grinned at her. “Does that mean I can go again?”

“In a bit,” Anathema said. “I need – I need some time.” Newt rubbed her back soothingly. Anathema understood what he meant about feeling the aftereffects as a hangover. She felt shaky, uncertain of who she was or her ability to control her own actions.

“You can do me next time,” Newt said to Crowley. “We’ll take turns.”

“Perhaps it would be helpful if Crowley tries possessing you at unexpected times,” Aziraphale suggested. “That’s a better test of what the real possession will be like.”

Anathema groaned inwardly. The only thing worse than being possessed would be knowing you were about to be possessed at any moment. But it was a good point. The dying person Crowley would ultimately possess wouldn’t be just standing there inviting him to come in. So Newt and Anathema agreed that they would go about their normal routines for the day, and Crowley would strike as the spirit, as it were, moved him.

Over the course of the morning, it became increasingly clear that Crowley liked possessing people. He showed a fiendish delight in slamming into them and taking over at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. He also enjoyed making them do silly things while in his possession – having Newt do an impression of Aziraphale’s gavotting, having Anathema do an impression of Aziraphale’s magic show – although Aziraphale was there to prevent him from doing anything too horrible. At one point, Anathema was about to step out into the garden when she heard a loud crash and a muffled curse from the kitchen, which Newt had just stepped into.

“Crowley,” came Newt’s voice in a roar, angrier than Anathema had ever heard her husband. “Stop possessing my daughter!”

“I’m not,” Crowley called from the sofa, where he was innocently occupying his own body.

“Oh.” Now Newt sounded embarrassed. “Never mind.”

Anathama stuck her head in the kitchen and saw Newt had slipped and fallen on the slick puddle of vegetable oil that Sage was in the process of happily pouring out onto the floor. “Sweetie,” Newt told his daughter in fond exasperation, “cooking ingredients are not toys. In fact, nothing in the kitchen is a toy, got it?”

Over lunch, Aziraphale suggested one last practice run. “So far, we’ve only had Crowley possess willing hosts,” he said.

“I wasn’t really that willing,” Newt objected.

Aziraphale ignored him and went on. “I think we need to try someone outside our little circle here. Someone who’s not expecting it at all and might resist. That way, we can make sure Crowley can overcome an unwilling host and possess them by force.” Aziraphale blinked and looked a bit discomfited at his own words. Anathema supposed that angels weren’t used to serving as cornermen for demons in the act of forcefully possessing humans.

After lunch, Anathema loaded Rowan into a baby buggy while Newt cajoled Sage into putting on her shoes in preparation for an outing. They all went down to Tadfield’s modest town center to find an unwilling host. They found one in the form of one R.P. Tyler, who was walking his dog around the town square, ever vigilant against unkempt landscaping and teenagers playing loud music and out-of-towners driving their cars too fast.

“Target acquired,” Newt said, fixing his eyes on Mr. Tyler in undisguised anticipation.

Crowley sat down next to Aziraphale on a bench in the square while Newt and Anathema let the children play on the grass. Mr. Tyler was making a beeline toward them, undoubtably suspicious as to what these out-of-towners*** were doing enjoying themselves in the sunshine on a nice summer afternoon. Up to no good, clearly. Before Mr. Tyler could begin his interrogation, Crowley slumped into Aziraphale, who put his arm around his shoulder to keep him from falling off the bench. Mr. Tyler stopped in his tracks, his eyes yellow and slitted, while his dog sniffed at him and then yelped in panic. With an evil grin, Crowley used Mr. Tyler’s body to tip over a rubbish bin.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said with disapproval.

“What?” Crowley asked in Mr. Tyler’s voice. “I had to do something the man would never do, just to make sure I’m in full control.”

“It’s brilliant,” Newt said. “Let me assure you, there’s no one more deserving of having a demon in his head.”

“Even so,” Aziraphale said. “I think that’s a sufficient test, so give the poor man his body back.”

A moment later, Crowley was straightening himself out on the bench while Mr. Tyler stood staring at the pile of rubbish. “What have I done?” he muttered to himself. “Why did I do that?”

Aziraphale made to stand, but Crowley grabbed his arm. “If you erase that man’s memory, I will never forgive you,” Crowley hissed.

“He’s right,” Anathema said. “Maybe this experience will make him a better person.”

Mr. Tyler turned his confused gaze to them.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Tyler,” Newt said politely.

“Afternoon,” Mr. Tyler said vaguely, and wandered off. No doubt he was mentally composing a letter to the Tadfield _Advertiser_.†

Declaring the test run a success, the group collectively decided it was time to go to the hospital. Aziraphale objected, spared a moment to magically clean up the spilled rubbish, then agreed that _now_ it was time to go to the hospital. The next person Crowley possessed would be someone who was having such a rough day that demonic possession would be the least of their worries.

* * *

*Seriously, don’t ever do this.

**Cleaning your soul with bleach is not recommended, as it can result in chemical burns. If your soul is really in need of some spiffing up, try a solution of one part white vinegar diluted in two parts water.

***Aziraphale and Crowley were, of course, from farther out of town than Mr. Tyler even suspected. According to Mr. Tyler’s citizenship rules, Newt and Anathema were also out-of-towners, given that they had only lived in Tadfield for six years, and Anathema was a foreigner at that. Under the hereditary system Mr. Tyler had adopted, Sage and Rowan were also out-of-towners, even though they had been delivered by a midwife right in Jasmine Cottage, because they were the offspring of out-of-towners. If the children stayed in the village their entire lives, _their_ children could potentially achieve the status of Tadfield locals, depending on whether they got any tattoos or did anything unconventional with their hair.

†He knew he had something to complain about, but he was damned if he knew what it was.


	7. Chapter 7

Crowley and Aziraphale drove the Bentley to the local hospital, following the Pulsifer-Device family in that car with the ridiculous name that Crowley couldn’t be bothered to remember the name of. Crowley vaguely recognized where they were as they pulled into the car park.

“Hey, this is the same hospital we went to last year,” he said. “The one where –”

“Yes, it’s the same one,” Aziraphale said, looking distressed. Crowley had been out of it during most of his stay here the previous year, but he supposed that Aziraphale had not had a fun time hanging around waiting to see if Crowley was about to be disincorporated and sent Down Below.

They parked the Bentley, and Crowley moved to get out, but Aziraphale stopped him. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” Aziraphale said.

“I’m an expert possessor now,” Crowley said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“I know, but…” Aziraphale was looking at him with huge eyes. “Have you thought about what it will be like to possess the mind of a dying human? That’s almost like experiencing mortality yourself. Our kind wasn’t meant for that.”

Crowley appreciated Aziraphale’s use of the word _our_ in _our kind_ , as if they were fundamentally the same kind of being. They weren’t, as Crowley well knew, but it meant more to him than he would ever admit that Aziraphale felt that they were.

“I don’t mind,” Crowley said aloud. “Better me than you. I won’t get all sentimental about it like you would.”

“Just promise you’ll come back if it’s too much. And, well, promise you’ll come back.”

“I will.” Crowley patted Aziraphale’s arm reassuringly, then they got out of the Bentley.

Together with their human allies, they entered the hospital. Newt was hauling Rowan in a baby carrier, and Anathema kept a firm grip on Sage’s hand to prevent her from terrifying any innocent bystanders with her zombie and/or demon impressions. The hospital was crowded and chaotic. Not knowing what else to do, the authorities had begun rounding up zombies* and sending them to hospitals in the vague hope that medical science could figure something out as well as the more specific hope that this at least got them off the streets so normal people wouldn’t have to think about them too much. Like most hospitals, this one had opened a zombie ward, isolated from the other patients with the ostensible justification that no one knew if the condition was contagious and the actual justification that no one wanted a zombie for a roommate. Even the non-zombie wards were close to full with the lingering incidental victims of the zombie attack, people who had been injured in car accidents or stampeded by fleeing crowds or had fallen from heights in astonishment at what they were seeing. Medical personnel rushed around with harried looks, while waiting rooms overflowed with patients and their families. In other words, it was perfect. With everyone this busy and distracted, conditions were ideal for pulling off a clandestine mission.

Their small group went up to the reception desk in the ER. “I’m ill,” Crowley said, performing a minor miracle so that any human looking at him would agree with that diagnosis but be disinclined to look at him too closely. “Really ill.”

The woman staffing the desk barely looked at him. “Sorry to hear that, love,” she said. “It’s a bit of a wait for non-emergency patients, so you all can have a seat and fill out this paperwork.” She handed him a thick stack of forms. “We’ll take care of you just as soon as we can.”

Crowley was about to up the ante with his miracle to make himself appear to be an emergency patient, but Aziraphale took his elbow and drew him aside. “We can’t take a bed from someone who really needs it,” the angel whispered. That, of course, had not occurred to Crowley. Things like that never did occur to him, but they didn’t have to, since Aziraphale was there for them to occur to.

“So we’ll free up a bed,” Crowley whispered back. “Find someone who’s hurt or ill, but not too badly, so we can fix them up with a minor miracle and send them on their way, then I take their bed. Nothing morally wrong with that, is there? I’d say it’s a net good.”

Aziraphale weighed the morality of it, then nodded in agreement. Between the two of them, they generated the magic needed to conceal themselves and the Pulsifer-Devices long enough for them all to sneak into the ward where the patient rooms were.

They passed a supply closet, and Newt said, “I’ve got an idea.” He handed baby Rowan to Aziraphale, and Anathema told Sage to stay with her Uncle Crowley. Newt and Anathema ducked into the supply closet. Aziraphale made cooing noises and bounced the baby. Crowley tried to keep Sage from running off, finally resorting to dangling her upside down by her ankles, which made her squeal in delight. After a couple of minutes, Newt and Anathema came back outside, both dressed in scrubs. Now they were free to walk the hospital corridors while Aziraphale and Crowley trailed behind, still wrangling the children.

As they went, Newt and Anathema took advantage of their medical disguises to step into patient rooms and take a quick look at their charts, trying to find some good candidates. When they neared the end of the corridor, having checked perhaps two dozen rooms, Anathema emerged from one room with a look of triumph. “The woman in here has a traumatic brain injury,” she said quietly. “Apparently, she fell down a flight of stairs yesterday while trying to flee a zombie. She’s been on life support for nearly 24 hours and, according to her advance directive, they’re pulling the plug on her this afternoon. Score!” Anathema’s look of triumph metamorphosed into a look of guilt, and she muttered, “I mean, it’s terrible, obviously. But we might as well make the best of it, right?”

“Right,” Crowley said, taking a peek inside the room. It was empty, other than an elderly woman lying in the bed, her head bandaged, hooked up to all sorts of machines that made all sorts of noises.

“That’s not all,” Newt said, emerging from the room across the hall. “This one’s got a bloke with appendicitis. Is that the sort of thing you can heal with a minor miracle?”

“I’m not sure,” Aziraphale said, clearly having no idea what appendicitis was. “Let me take a look.”

Crowley and Aziraphale handed off the children and then entered the room, where a young man was curled up in the fetal position, guarding his abdomen, moaning in pain. “Just kill me now,” the man pleaded.

“Now, now, you’re not that ill,” Aziraphale said soothingly. “I can help you.” He gently moved the man’s hands aside and laid his own hand on the patient’s belly. The man looked up at Aziraphale for the first time.

“Hey, are you a doctor?” he asked groggily. “Because you don’t look like one. Sounds stupid, I know, but you look like an angel. I’d like to see your medical license—” Suddenly, he stopped talking, and all the pain disappeared from his face. “Hey, you’re good,” he said in wonder.

“That’s an understatement,” Crowley muttered.

“In thirty seconds, you will wake up,” Aziraphale said to the man whose inflamed appendix had miraculously disappeared from his body.** “You will never have had appendicitis, whatever that is, so you will have no need to be in hospital. Therefore, you will quietly go home without speaking to any of the medical staff. Oh, and you will have had a lovely dream about whatever you like best.”

Aziraphale and Crowley waited out in the hallway with the Pulsifer-Devices while the de-appendixed man dazedly gathered up his things and wandered off.

“You could have also instructed him to put his clothes back on,” Crowley said to Aziraphale as they watched the man walk away with his hospital gown open in the back.

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said worriedly. “Should I—”

“Leave it. The world needs a laugh these days.”

Their group took over the newly vacant room. Crowley got into the patient bed. Any human who saw him would think he was wearing a hospital gown, but he wasn’t. He didn’t believe in method acting.

“All right, you are now –” Newt checked the chart again – “Basil Fuddlesmythe? Really? Anyway, you are suffering from appendicitis. And I suppose now all we have to do is wait for the action to start across the hall.”

They waited. It took a couple of hours, during which time Rowan fell asleep, Sage bounced on the hospital bed and occasionally on Crowley, Newt fiddled with and immediately broke the medical equipment that had been left behind, Anathema read _The New Aquarian_ on her phone, Aziraphale watched Crowley with growing concern about the upcoming mission, and Crowley brushed off Aziraphale’s growing concern. Every so often, a nurse came into the room to check on poor Mr. Fuddlesmythe, but Crowley or Aziraphale would wave a hand and the nurse would walk back out, under the impression that they had already checked on Mr. Fuddlesmythe.

Finally, a doctor and nurse entered the patient room across the hall with a decidedly somber air. Anathema checked her watch. “It’s time,” she said.

Aziraphale took Crowley’s hand. “Are you ready, my dear?”

“Yes, just –” Crowley gently extricated his hand. “Just give me some room, all right? I can’t get into the proper demonic mindset with you hovering over me like that.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.” Aziraphale retreated back a few feet, looking miserable.

“Don’t look at me like that either,” Crowley snapped.

“Like what?”

“You know.” Crowley fiddled with the edge of the thin hospital blanket. “Just don’t.”

“All right,” Aziraphale said softly, making such an obvious effort to adopt a neutral expression that Crowley couldn’t help but laugh.

“Keep an eye on my incorporation,” Crowley said. “Don’t let this little imp –” he pointed to Sage, who had wrapped herself around her father’s leg and was scaling him like a tree – “draw on my face or anything.”

“I’ll guard it as if it were my own,” Aziraphale said with painful sincerity.

“All right, then, I’m off,” Crowley said. “See you soon.” He could see that Aziraphale was about to say something else, likely something that would make it difficult to get into the proper demonic mindset, so he quickly flung his consciousness across the hall before he had a chance to hear it.

In his practice runs, Crowley had found possession quite an enjoyable pastime and was slightly irked at himself for not getting into it centuries ago. He had initially expected seeing humans from the inside to be unpleasant, like a visit to the proverbial sausage factory. But, to his surprise, the sensation was pleasurable. While possessing humans, he had felt, for the first time in his long existence, a sense of embodiment. Not mere incorporation, which amounted to squatting in a vacant building, but embodiment, making the physical world his home rather than just a place he visited. Of course, it was an illusion. He had no real connection to the human bodies he was possessing. He was merely hijacking his hosts’ own sense of embodied cognition. But it was a novel sensation, and to a being who had lived for as long and experienced as much as Crowley, novel sensations were pleasurable in themselves.

Then there was the sense of power. Quite apart from the novel bodily sensations, Crowley was sure that the sense of power was what had made possession such a popular hobby among his fellow demons. It was intoxicating, the sense of ownership over the hapless human host. Mere temptation paled in comparison. To be embedded in the mind of a human was temptation itself. It was ripe with the possibility of making them do anything and think anything, and then making them believe that those actions and thoughts were their own.

The only thing that kept Crowley from fully enjoying the tantalizing fruits of possession was his conscience. He did have one, thanks to his millennia of hanging around Aziraphale. His conscience was stunted and battered as a tree clinging to a windswept stony mountaintop, but it clung there nevertheless. When he possessed Newt, then Anathema, then Mr. R.P. Tyler, he could feel each of their wills struggling against his own, and he could imagine Aziraphale’s look of disapproval. _How can you derive pleasure from human suffering?_ Crowley’s conscience would ask him.*** And as soon as the question was asked, he no longer could. That was why he had released each of his practice hosts quickly.

Now, as he entered the mind of the dying old woman in the hospital, he knew he would have to hold on for longer, and that was going to be harder to do. Whereas his previous hosts had been reasonably healthy and happy† people going about their everyday business, the mind he had just entered was a wasteland. He understood now, on a visceral level, what the term _braindead_ meant. There was no struggle against his presence because there was nothing to struggle with. With that lack of resistance, the guilty pleasure of power evaporated, because there were no actions he could make this woman take or thoughts he could make her think. There was no _her_ left to do anything or think anything with.

That’s not to say there was nothing, though. That sense of embodiment was still there, but now it was like a steel trap that had enclosed him. The woman had been taken off the ventilator, and she was sedated, and as far as anyone knew that meant that she was not in pain. But there was pain, even if there was no _she_ to be in it. It was as though pain had taken over the mind where the person used to be. It was mortal pain, and it had a different quality than any pain Crowley had experienced during his numerous and occasionally gruesome disincorporations. It was an all-encompassing pain, a pain without end, an end in itself.

Crowley realized that, this time, he was the one who was struggling against the possession. Dimly, he was aware that maybe Aziraphale had been right about this vicarious experience of mortality not being the greatest idea. With effort, he managed to get himself under control. After all, he told himself, this wasn’t forever. He could feel the cells in the woman’s body dying off one by one for want of oxygen. Soon, she would be dead, and her suffering, and his, would be over.

After an unmeasurable amount of time had passed while Crowley let the death throes rolls over him, there was a sudden sense of release. It was not unlike being disincorporated, when that first instant was such a relief that the pain was over that one almost didn’t mind being back in Hell and facing the equal pain of the reams of paperwork associated with issuance of a new body. But this time, Crowley hadn’t gone anywhere. He was still in the mind of the woman, but the woman was no longer in her body. She was standing beside her hospital bed, looking sadly at her own corpse.

Still inside her mind, Crowley could feel her shock and sadness. _Is this really how it ends?_ He couldn’t tell if the thought was hers or his.

_I’m sorry_ , Crowley said to her, and meant it.

_Thank you. I was afraid of dying alone. You must be an angel._

Crowley barely had enough time to suppress a snort of inappropriate laughter at that when he realized there was someone else in the hospital room. Someone tall and thin, features hidden by a black cloak.

A HITCHHIKER, Death said with interest.

“Er, yes,” Crowley said. “Hi. Sorry about that, I’m sure you’re busy, I just wondered if we could have a quick word.”

Death tilted his head as if considering this. I DON’T GET MANY VISITORS.

“Well, you’re a hard being to reach.”

NOT REALLY. With that, Death produced a scythe out of this air. In a graceful motion born of long practice, he swept it an arc right though Crowley’s chest. Not _Crowley’s_ chest, but the chest of the human he was possessing. And not _her_ chest, but the chest of the spectral version of the human who was standing next to her own dead body.

Crowley flinched and shut his eyes instinctively as he saw the scythe coming at him‡, but he felt nothing. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was no longer occupying a spectral version of the human’s body, but a spectral version of his own body. He was no longer possessing the human because there was nothing left to possess. The soul had been reaped. 

“Where did you send her?” Crowley asked, partly to make small talk, partly because he genuinely hoped the poor old lady hadn’t been sent Down Below.

WHERE SHE BELONGS. Death put away the scythe like he was hanging it on an invisible hook, and it vanished.

“Ah.” That conversational well run dry, Crowley made his next question sound as casual as the previous one. “And when we’re done here, I can…?”

I ASSUME YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY BACK TO YOUR OWN INCORPORATION. I’M NOT YOUR ÜBER DRIVER.

“Of course, of course.” Now that Crowley felt reasonably confident that he would be allowed to leave when this was over, he decided it was time to get down to business. “I’m Crowley, by the way. I’m a demon, obviously, although I don’t work for Hell anymore—”

I REMEMBER YOU. WE’VE MET.

“Right. I’m flattered that you remember little old me.” Crowley laughed nervously. He wished that he could stop sounding like such an idiot. He had a feeling that he was trying Death’s patience and that Death was the kind of being whose patience really shouldn’t be tried. “Anyway, I was just hoping to ask you for some information, if you don’t mind—”

I’LL PLAY YOU FOR IT.

“Sorry?”

CHESS. ONE GAME. YOU WIN, I TELL YOU WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW. I WIN, YOU BELONG TO ME.

Crowley’s heart thudded, or it would have if it weren’t currently in the room on the other side of the hospital corridor, blissfully unaware of what his consciousness was up to. Chess wasn’t really his game. He hadn’t played it since the sixth century, and he hadn’t been very good at it even then. On the other hand, he was determined enough to get the information he needed on what Above and Below were planning, and reckless enough to think that maybe he could beat Death with sheer grit and a bit of luck, that his instinctual response to the challenge was to stammer, “Er, you might need to remind me which pieces move which way, it’s been a while since I played—”

He was interrupted by a sound like dry leaves rustling in the wind, like maggots hatching into flies, like gases sighing out of the bloated belly of a decomposing corpse. After a moment, Crowley realized it was the sound of Death laughing at him.

I’M ONLY JOKING. I DON’T EVEN PLAY CHESS. NOW, TRIVIA SCRABBLE, THERE’S A GAME.

“So,” Crowley said uncertainly, “you want me to play you at trivia scrabble…?” He didn’t think he’d do much better at that than chess, unless all the questions happened to be about horticulture and classic cars.

NO, FORGET THE GAME. THAT LOOK ON YOUR FACE WAS ENTERTAINMENT ENOUGH. GO ON, ASK YOUR QUESTIONS, DEMON.

“All right.” Crowley relaxed a bit, but only a bit. “Well, I don’t know if you pay much attention to politics, but Heaven and Hell just merged —”

I AM AWARE.

“Right, and I’m sure you know they’ve been doing some funny business with human souls. Since that’s your area of expertise, I thought you might know what they’re up to.”

I HAVE BEEN AN INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR FOR HEAVEN AND HELL FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS. DURING THAT TIME, I HAVE CONSISTENTLY FULFILLED THE TERMS OF MY SERVICE AGREEMENT. I DELIVER THE SOULS WHERE THEY BELONG. WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM AFTER THAT IS NO CONCERN OF MINE.

“I understand that, but doesn’t it bother you as a professional that souls are being shuffled around like laundered money in offshore bank accounts? I mean, they took the souls of living humans to Heaven, complete with their earthly bodies. That’s a bit irregular, isn’t it? And then Hell took a bunch of souls before their time, leaving their still-living bodies on Earth. It’s supposed to be a simple operation. The humans die, their bodies stay on Earth to rot, you take their souls where they belong. But now you’ve got living bodies in Heaven, the walking dead on Earth, just a complete mess.”

Death shifted slightly, which was the only indication that he was considering Crowley’s words. I WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH THOSE OPERATIONS.

“So they’re making side deals without you? Isn’t that a violation of your service agreement or whatever? I thought you had the exclusive right to transport human souls.”

IT’S A LOOPHOLE. THOSE SOULS WERE NOT DEAD. Something in Death’s tone made Crowley realize that this was something of a sore point, so he pressed it.

“And now they never will be, right? Isn’t that upsetting the natural order of things? And why are they doing it? What do they need all that power for –”

LISTEN TO ME, DEMON. Crowley wisely shut up. I’M SURE THAT IN YOUR EMPLOYEE TRAINING, YOU WERE TOLD ABOUT HOW HEAVEN AND HELL DERIVE THEIR POWER FROM HUMANITY.

“When human souls enter Heaven or Hell after death, they charge the place up,” Crowley confirmed. “That’s why Above and Below have spent most of the past six millennia saving or condemning souls, because they’ve been competing for a scarce resource.”

WHAT IS LESS WIDELY KNOWN IS THAT HUMANITY HAS POWER OF THEIR OWN.

“Really? That wasn’t in the employee handbook.” Crowley frowned as he took in the implications of this new information. “What power have they got?”

IT IS A POWER THAT COMES NOT FROM GOD, BUT FROM THEMSELVES. THEY HAVE SO INCREASED IN NUMBERS AND KNOWLEDGE THAT THEY NOW DOMINATE THE EARTH. LOOK AT THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET. ALL OF IT IS ALTERED BY HUMANS AND THEIR WORKS. WITH THE ADVANCES IN THEIR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, THEIR POWER GROWS EVER STRONGER. IT’S A ZERO-SUM GAME. AS HUMANITY’S POWER INCREASES, THE POWER OF HEAVEN AND HELL WANES. HUMANITY’S POWER HAS BECOME GREATER THAN EVEN GOD HERSELF ENVISIONED. SOON, THEY WILL BE THE GODS OF THIS PLANET.

“So Heaven and Hell are threatened by that, and that’s why they teamed up against humanity,” Crowley summarized. “They’re fighting for their continued existence. That was the point of the Apocalypse, to leave the remaining humans so few in number and stuck in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, with so much of their knowledge lost, that it would work as a reset button. It would have kept humanity’s power in check.”

PRECISELY. AND SINCE THE APOCALYPSE WAS AVERTED, THEY HOPE TO ACHIEVE THE SAME RESULT BY OTHER MEANS.

“What are those other means? The number of new souls they’ve brought in so far can’t be enough, it’s just a blip in humanity’s total population—”

THAT INFLUX OF NEW SOULS SERVES TWO FUNCTIONS. FIRST, IT BRINGS IN A SURGE OF POWER SO THAT HEAVEN AND HELL HAVE THE RESOURCES TO MASSIVELY EXPAND THEIR OPERATIONS ON EARTH. SECOND, IT MAKES THE HUMANS TERRIFIED AND VULNERABLE.

Crowley thought of the chaos that was unfolding on Earth. Back when he was still one of Down Below’s operatives, he would have relished the opportunity for mass temptation. “So they’ll be sending operatives to Earth to conduct salvations and temptations. And the uncertainty of the times will make most of the humans into superstitious nutters, which will rein in humanity’s power.”

THAT IS THE PLAN.

Crowley shook his head. He never would have figured that out on his own, which by itself had make this little excursion worthwhile. But, since Death had been surprisingly helpful so far, he decided to press his luck and see if he could get any suggestions for how to proceed. “So, assuming someone wanted to thwart this plan of theirs –”

ALTHOUGH HUMANITY IN THE AGGREGATE IS POWERFUL, PERHAPS EVEN MORE POWERFUL THAN THE FORCES OF HEAVEN AND HELL, THEIR WEAKNESS IS THAT INDIVIDUAL HUMANS ARE MORTAL. IT IS THOSE INDIVIDUAL MORTAL SOULS, WHICH BY CONTRACT I AM OBLIGATED TO DELIVER TO HEAVEN OR HELL, THAT KEEPS THE DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS ABOVE AND BELOW GOING. Death took a furtive look around. IF THOSE OPERATIONS ARE TO BE DISRUPTED, IT MUST BE THROUGH THOSE HUMAN SOULS.

“All right,” Crowley said slowly, “but how?”

I WILL TELL YOU.

And Crowley listened as Death laid out a plan to sabotage Heaven and Hell and save humanity.

* * *

*They didn’t call them zombies, of course. The official name for the condition was Sudden Catatonic Syndrome, or SCS. Everyone who didn’t work for a government agency or hospital still called them zombies, though.

**It had reappeared on a New York City subway platform, where it attracted little attention because it was the least disgusting thing in sight.

***As expected, Crowley’s conscience sounded just like Aziraphale. But, for his own amusement, Crowley liked to picture it as a cricket with a top hat and umbrella.

†Happiness comes on a sliding scale. Newt and Anathema both had a generally high baseline happiness. Mr. R.P. Tyler was what most people would consider an unhappy person, with a much lower baseline. But he was also one of those people with a paradoxical disposition, in which unhappiness made him happy, so he was completely aware of how unhappy he was and assumed that what he was feeling was happiness. To an objective outside observer, the only time he appeared truly happy was while composing a letter to the Tadfield _Advertiser_.

‡Not at _him_ , cf. the previous paragraph.


	8. Chapter 8

“What is taking so long?” Aziraphale paced back and forth across the hospital room. The room wasn’t big enough to accommodate a satisfactory pacing distance. It was barely three steps from one side to the other. With the frenetic pace of Aziraphale’s pacing, he was nearby bouncing between the walls, and Newt and Anathema were watching him go back and forth as if watching a game of table tennis.

“Just sit down, will you?” Newt said. “You’re making me dizzy just watching you.”

Temperamentally unable to refuse most polite requests made of him*, Aziraphale sat in an empty chair. “How long has it been?”

Anathema looked at her watch. “Ten minutes since the poor lady across the hall bit the dust.” They had been eavesdropping and had heard the doctor declare the time of death.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Newt suggested. “Means old Death is taking some time out for a nice chat.”

“Or maybe he’s sent Crowley Down Below,” Aziraphale countered.

“Can Death even do that?” Anathema wondered. “I thought he only had jurisdiction over human souls.”

“Who are we to say what Death does or does not have jurisdiction over? I mean, he’s _Death_.” Aziraphale looked at Crowley’s empty incorporation in the hospital bed, then looked away. “Or maybe Crowley never met Death at all. None of us has any idea what happens to a demon who’s possessing a human who dies. It might never have happened before, because any other demon would have the sense to vacate the human _before_ they died. I can’t believe I let him do this. What was I thinking?”

“There’s no reason to be concerned yet,” Anathema said. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“Five minutes,” Aziraphale said, standing up to pace again. “If he’s not back in five minutes, I’ll find another dying human to possess myself. This hospital must be full of them. Then I’ll meet Death myself—”

“I don’t recommend that,” Crowley said, sitting up in the bed. “He’s a decent enough bloke, but he’ll talk your ear off.”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale threw himself onto the bed and put his hands on Crowley’s shoulders. “You’re all right?”

“Tickety-boo.” Crowley grinned and gave one of Aziraphale’s wrists a reassuring squeeze.

“So how was it?” Newt asked. “Was Death any help?”

“Very much so. Come on, let’s get out of here.” Crowley leapt up from the bed. “I’ll tell you all about it back at the cottage.”

As they left the hospital and walked out to the Bentley, Aziraphale saw that Crowley was simmering with a manic energy, which likely meant that whatever Death had told him, it had laid the groundwork for some sort of plan to resist Above and Below. On the drive back to the cottage, Crowley filled Aziraphale in on some of what he had learned. Apparently, Death was rather disgruntled with Heaven and Hell because they were circumventing their agreement with him to traffic in human souls independently. For that reason, Death had been unexpectedly cooperative. Aziraphale listened with interest to the revelation that humanity had a power that Above and Below felt threatened by.

“That explains a lot,” Aziraphale said. “Why both sides were so determined to bring about the Apocalypse, why they entered into the merger, why they’ve been liquidating souls – they’re all the last desperate attempts to keep a falling empire going.”

“Right. Now they’re going to be working hard to reduce humanity’s numbers and send them back to the intellectual equivalent of the stone age. Above and Below can’t bring about a global catastrophe on their own, but they can convince scared and vulnerable humans to bring about their own destruction. You and I have always known that the things they do to each other are far worse than anything Heaven and Hell can think up.”

Aziraphale thought of many a dark moment in history, when he and Crowley had been holed up somewhere trying to drink enough to forget whatever atrocity they had just witnessed. With Heaven and Hell going all in on encouraging such acts, they might succeed in destroying human civilization without the need for an Antichrist or any Horsemen.

They arrived back at the cottage and gathered round inside, and Crowley had to repeat what he’d already told Aziraphale for Newt and Anathema’s benefit. “So you’re saying,” Newt said slowly, “that we’ve gotten so clever with our science and technology that we pose a threat to the continued existence of Heaven and Hell?” He looked proud.

“Yes, but don’t get too puffed up about it,” Crowley said. “Don’t forget, you’re a threat to your own continued existence too.”

“Well, yes, but we already knew that.”

“So if Heaven and Hell want to cut humanity down to size,” Anathema said, “what can we do to stop them?”

“Ah, see, that’s the really brilliant bit.” Crowley was excited now. “Remember, the whole apparatus runs on human souls. Up Above and Down Below each have what amounts to a giant furnace that they’ve been feeding souls into ever since the dawn of humanity.”

“That must be a lot of souls,” Newt said.

“107 billion, give or take. Death gave me a much more precise figure than that, but then said not to worry and just round it off, because the number’s going up all the time anyway. They’re split roughly equally between Above and Below. Anyway, six millennia ago, Death worked out an agreement that he would send souls either Above or Below, so that Heaven and Hell could use them for power. From Death’s perspective, Heaven and Hell were just convenient temporary soul storage. Apparently, he really doesn’t like the souls of the dead cluttering up the Earth, so he was happy just to be rid of them. But the point is, those giant furnaces are not the ultimate fate of those souls. Eventually, they’re supposed to go away, permanently.”

“When?” Anathema asked.

“Death wasn’t too clear on that. He said something depressing about how he was there before the beginning and would still be there after the end, and he had seen loads of supposedly eternal things eventually crumble into dust, blah blah blah. But the point is, Death built a sort of escape hatch into each of those soul furnaces, just so Heaven and Hell wouldn’t have control over the final fate of the souls.** If those hatches are opened, all the stored souls drain out.”

Crowley spread his hands apart to illustrate the draining out of the souls. His audience stared at him blankly.

“Don’t you see?” Crowley said urgently. “No souls stored Above and Below, no power to run Above and Below. And that’s not all. Apparently, once the hatches are open, they can’t be closed. So no new souls could ever go Above or Below to power them. This is how we take these bastards out. We bring down the electrical grid.”

“So, with Heaven and Hell powered down, they would just –” Anathema asked.

“Apparently, they would be cut off from Earth. No angels or demons coming here, no souls going there. You humans would finally have Above and Below off your backs for good.”

“If Death is so hacked off at Heaven and Hell, why doesn’t he just open the hatches himself?” Newt wondered.

“He says his agreement with Heaven and Hell states that he doesn’t set foot Above or Below, and I suppose he’s a being of his word. As long as his service agreement is in effect, he won’t interfere directly with their operations.” Crowley shrugged. “But, Aziraphale, you and I can do it. I know we’re not exactly welcome Upstairs or Downstairs these days, but we can work out a way to sneak in –” He broke off as he took in the horrified look Aziraphale could feel on his own face.

“Don’t worry, angel,” Crowley added quickly. “I asked Death what would happen to you and me once we drain Heaven and Hell. As long as we’re on Earth when the last soul comes out, we’ll be able to stay here. We’ll have to hurry back to Earth once we open the hatches so we don’t get trapped on the other side, but apparently we should have enough time because it takes quite a while to drain 107 billion souls.*** Once Earth is cut off from Heaven and Hell, we won’t be able to do miracles, but we won’t really need them anymore, and we’ll still be immortal as long as we’re careful not to get disincorporated. We can live forever here on Earth with the humans, and have all the Ritz dinners and bottles of wine and duck feedings we want.” Crowley finished and flashed a grin, as excited as Aziraphale had ever seen him.

Aziraphale felt a hollow feeling inside. “My dear,” he said, not even knowing where to start. “What would happen to all those human souls? The ones already there and the ones yet to come? Where would they go?”

“You just send ‘em,” Crowley said with the wry smile he reserved for sharing one of their old jokes. “Best not to worry about where they go.” Aziraphale felt his own expression darken further. Did Crowley really not understand what the problem was?

“I mean,” Crowley corrected himself quickly, clearly sensing that there was a problem even if he still didn’t understand what it was. “Death said the hatches opened into a sort of void. I don’t think the souls would go anywhere. They would just be … gone.”

“So you are suggesting,” Aziraphale said, his voice as brittle as an icicle, “that we willfully destroy the soul of every human who has ever lived? And that we make it so that every present and future human who ever lives will also have their soul destroyed when they die? That we consign 107 billion people, plus untold billions to come, to oblivion?”

“Well, it sounds worse than it is,” Crowley said uncertainly. “Keep in mind, about half those souls are getting the living daylights tortured out of them Down Below. I’ve spent much more time down in the pit than you have. Believe me, non-existence would be pretty appealing to the condemned.”

“That’s not your decision to make. Anyway, the other half are in Heaven. They’re enjoying eternal bliss.”

Crowley snorted. “You sound like Above’s propaganda. You don’t really believe Heaven is eternal bliss, do you? I mean, you couldn’t get out of there fast enough yourself.”

“For humans, it is eternal bliss,” Aziraphale said, his anger growing as Crowley gave him a disbelieving look. Crowley could be so cynical, acting as though just because the leadership of Heaven were hypocrites, there was no such thing as good.

“It is,” Aziraphale insisted. “I’ve spent much more time up _there_ than you have. The souls _are_ content in Heaven. It’s where they reunite with their loved ones, where they can enjoy their favorite things, where they can finally exist without pain after all the suffering they endured during their mortal lives. It’s their _reward_ , for doing the right thing and being good. And you would just take that away from them? It’s all they have.” Frustratingly, Aziraphale could feel tears brimming in his eyes. He brushed them away.

Crowley looked stunned at the depth of Aziraphale’s feelings on the matter. That just made Aziraphale angrier. Did Crowley really not understand how much Aziraphale loved humans, how much he wanted them to be good and to earn their just reward for it?

“Well,” Crowley stammered. “Maybe they are happy. I don’t know, and neither do you. But either way, they’re being used. I know you care about them, but upper management doesn’t. They just see them as means to an end, as natural resources to be exploited. Even if it means giving up their eternal souls, humans are better off without all the interference from Above and Below.”

“Who are we to decide the ultimate fate of human souls? We’re immortal beings. We have no idea what’s better for them.”

“Well, it’s not as if we can take a bloody poll.”

Newt and Anathema had fallen silent, but now Newt spoke up. “Speaking as a human, I think that –”

“Shut up, no one cares,” Crowley snapped.

Anathema nudged Newt and jerked her head toward the back garden. The two of them were considerate enough to round up the children and go outside so that Aziraphale and Crowley could have some privacy to continue their argument.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “This is wrong.”

“And I suppose you’re the one who gets to decide _that_ , right?” Crowley’s tone was bitter. “I mean, it’s not possible for me to do good or for you to do bad. You’re the angel, and I’m the demon. You’re just so much better than me.”

“I never thought I was better than you. Or I haven’t for a long time, anyway. I thought you were better than me.” Aziraphale took a deep breath before continuing. “But maybe I never understood you as well as I thought I did. Maybe you never understood me, if you thought I would go along with this. What you want to do is to use those humans, just like Above and Below use them. You want to throw all those souls away, just to defeat your enemies.”

“ _Our_ enemies. We’re on the same side, remember? All of Us versus All of Them.”

“You’ve only ever been on your own side,” Aziraphale said sadly. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

Now it was Crowley’s turn to get angry. “How can you say that to me?” he hissed. “After everything we’ve – I stood with humanity, I faced off against Satan himself with a tire iron – and _you_ – you know how I –”

“You enjoy humanity. You like the shiny toys they make, your Bentley and your suits and your flat. But you don’t care about humanity.” Aziraphale could feel his next words tumbling out of him of their own volition. “And I’m just like another of your toys. You need someone to keep you company and entertain you and make you feel clever. But you don’t really care about me, either.”

Crowley got very still, and Aziraphale immediately knew he had gone too far. But the words were already out, with no way to take them back.

“I guess I’m on my own then,” Crowley said flatly, turning away and making for the front door.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, not knowing what he was going to say after that. But he didn’t get a chance to say anything after that, because Crowley didn’t even slow down. He left the cottage. A moment later, Aziraphale heard the familiar roar of the Bentley’s engine as the car drove off.

* * *

*It’s an occupational hazard of being an angel.

**Death always holds all the cards. This is why, if Death ever challenges you to a game of poker, you should refuse to play. Same goes for trivia scrabble, regular scrabble, Risk, Monopoly, and Chutes and Ladders. If you’re a fair chess player, though, you can probably beat Death, as he himself admits that it’s not really his game. Just keep an eye on the board, as Death is a notorious cheater.

***It’s like when your bathtub drain gets clogged, except you shouldn’t be dumping souls down your bathtub drain. They wreak havoc with the plumbing.


	9. Chapter 9

Crowley tore down the road in the Bentley. He didn’t have a destination in mind, other than away from Aziraphale. He was so angry that he couldn’t see straight, so it was fortunate that the country lanes around Tadfield were mostly empty.

On the outskirts of town, which blended so gradually into the skirts of town that it was difficult to delineate the boundary, Crowley abruptly pulled off to the side of the road next to a picturesque sheep-dotted field. Having reached his immediate destination of _away from Aziraphale_ , he now needed a new destination. In addition to being so angry that he couldn’t see straight, he was also so angry that he couldn’t think straight, and he needed to think straight to determine his next destination. So it was time to cool off a bit.

Crowley leaned back in his seat and glared at the sheep. It wasn’t as satisfying as glaring at Aziraphale, but it would have to do. For someone so kind, Aziraphale could be so cruel. The two of them didn’t argue that often*, but when they did, Aziraphale never failed to find the words that would hurt Crowley the most. The words _you don’t really care about me_ kept replaying themselves in Crowley’s head. How could Aziraphale think that, when he was the only thing Crowley did care about?

In less than an hour, Crowley’s mood had fallen off a cliff, from the highs of excitement about finally having a way to defeat Above and Below for good, to the shocking low of Aziraphale being adamantly against it. They had been on the same page for the past few years, so it was easy to forget that they came from entirely different books. The fundamental difference between them was that Aziraphale still, even after everything that had happened, believed in some version of conventional morality, with good and evil firmly staked out. Crowley thought of all the times over the centuries when Aziraphale had insisted, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, that Crowley really was good deep down. Crowley had always strenuously resisted that classification, not because he believed that he was really evil, but because he rejected the whole concept of good and evil. What had the idea of good and evil ever accomplished, anyway? It made the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell not only possible but even inevitable, and it turned humans against each other. It made some people into self-righteous tossers and gave others license to give in to their own worse impulses. In Crowley’s view, people were just people, even beings like him and Aziraphale.

The same went for right and wrong. Crowley had a decidedly hedonistic view of morality.** Things were right if they made people happy, specifically if they made Crowley happy. By that reasoning, his plan to release the souls from Heaven and Hell was right, because it would keep him and Aziraphale safe from Above and Below, and that would make Crowley happy. But that same plan made Aziraphale unhappy, because according to Aziraphale’s rigid sense of morality, destroying human souls was Wrong. And if Aziraphale was unhappy, then by the transitive property, Crowley was unhappy. Ergo, releasing the souls from Heaven and Hell was Wrong, just because Aziraphale had decreed it so.

Now that he had some distance, Crowley wished he hadn’t accused Aziraphale of thinking he was better than him. That was one thing Aziraphale had never done. Even when they were technically enemies, Aziraphale had never looked down on Crowley. From their first meeting in the Garden, Aziraphale had treated him with respect, as if they were equals. He remembered, with a guilty twinge, how just a month ago Aziraphale had told him that Crowley had given him his faith back. At the time, Crowley had tried to tell Aziraphale that he wasn’t worthy of that faith, but the angel hadn’t listened. Crowley supposed that was why he had made Aziraphale so angry with his suggestion of discarding the human souls. Aziraphale had thought better of him, and Crowley had let him down. 

It had honestly not occurred to Crowley that there might be a moral quandary with obliterating the human souls trapped in Heaven and Hell until Aziraphale had pointed it out. Crowley didn’t have a very sharp eye for moral quandaries.*** That was another difference between them. Crowley tended to view humanity in the aggregate, and in the aggregate humanity was definitely better off without Above and Below on their backs. It was Aziraphale who worried endlessly about individual humans. Maybe individual human souls didn’t want to be obliterated, not even for the greater good. Now that Aziraphale had planted the seed of doubt, Crowley didn’t know what to do. That was an unusual problem for him. Usually, Crowley knew exactly what to do, which was whatever he wanted. But what he wanted had never before conflicted so sharply with what Aziraphale wanted.

Something made Crowley reach down to the space between the driver’s seat and the center console. The object he was looking for was still there. He pulled it out and looked at it sadly. _Lonely Planet Europe_. He and Aziraphale had had a good time the year before on their road trip across Europe. He remembered, wistfully, the day they had spent in Vienna, which Aziraphale had called a perfect day. Maybe they would have never have another day like that again. Even if they somehow survived this latest catastrophe, which was looking increasingly unlikely, maybe Aziraphale would finally follow through on his threat to never speak to Crowley again.

Crowley opened _Lonely Planet Europe_ to see if it had any advice. All it had to say was, _You’re lost_. “Thanks, very helpful,” Crowley muttered. He slammed the book shut and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat, where Aziraphale would normally sit.

Looking up again, Crowley was startled to see that, not only were the sheep watching him, so was Adam Young. The teenage Antichrist was on his bike, on which he had pedaled up silently as a bicycle-riding ninja, and his dog sat and panted next to him. Crowley got out of the Bentley so he could take out some of his frustration on Adam.

“What do you want?” Crowley demanded.

Adam shrugged. “Me and Dog were on our way back from the lake. We were there at the jumping rock with Pepper and Brian and Wensleydale. I saw you drive by in a hurry. Wanted to see where you were going.”

“When I figure that out, I’ll let you know,” Crowley snapped.

“You’re trying to decide whether to release all the souls from Heaven and Hell.” Adam put out the kickstand on his bike and sat on a rock.

“How do you know about that? Do you have some sort of psychic connection to all thing occult and ethereal?”

“No. Well, sort of. But also, Newt texted me about the row you and Aziraphale had over it.”

“Great.” Crowley wasn’t happy that his private disagreement with Aziraphale was now something for their human allies to gossip over. But, he supposed, that was their own fault for privately disagreeing so loudly. Suddenly, a thought struck him. “Hey,” he said, looking at Adam with newfound interest. “You’re human incarnate, right? You must be a good a representative of humanity as anyone. What should I do? Is it worth giving up your immortal souls so that we can make Above and Below leave humanity to get on with its business in peace?”

“I can’t decide on behalf of all humanity,” Adam said. “That’s part of being human incarnate. We’ve all got our own quirks. We can’t all agree on everything.”

“But what would _you_ want for yourself?” Crowley pressed. “I mean, you’re a mortal human. You’re going to die someday. Would you be okay with dissolving away into oblivion when that happens, in return for being able to determine your own fate while you’re alive with no occult or ethereal forces messing you about? Or would you rather let them subjugate all of humanity so that, when you die, you get to hang around in Heaven or Hell for eternity? I mean, you’re the Antichrist, so you’re definitely going to Hell, but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend Heaven is still on the table for you. Which would you choose?”

Adam squinted gnomically. “If you kill a whale, you’ve got a dead whale.”

“What? Is that supposed to be some sort of Zen koan?”

“No,” Adam explained patiently. “Just something I figured out during the Apocalypse. There was a lot going on at the time, so I’m not surprised if you don’t remember it. But that was what I realized. Once I started messing around, there’d be no stopping it. I could bring all the whales back, but I couldn’t stop people killing them. Seemed to me the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they’ve got a dead whale.”

“So you’re saying –” Crowley was still not sure what Adam was saying, but he wasn’t sure if that was his fault or Adam’s. “Who is doing the messing around in this analogy? Would I be messing around by releasing the souls, or would I be letting Above and Below keep messing people around by not releasing them?”

“That’s what you have to figure out. Either way, if you kill a whale, you’ve got a dead whale.”

“So you’re saying,” Crowley tried again, “whatever I choose, I have to live with the consequences.”

Adam nodded. “I made my choice. Now you have to make yours.”

Crowley thought about that. He thought about the consequences of either path he could take. On the one hand, if he did nothing, Heaven and Hell would bring humanity to its knees and would also eventually get around to destroying him and Aziraphale. On the other hand, if he released the souls, he would be responsible for the destruction of countless individual human souls, and Aziraphale might never forgive him. When he looked at it like that, the choice crystallized. Maybe it was selfish, maybe it was Wrong, but he didn’t care how many billions of souls he had to consign to oblivion, even if it meant that Aziraphale would hate him forever. Just as long as Aziraphale had a forever, Crowley could live with it.

“All right,” Crowley said. “That was – surprisingly helpful. I know what to do now.” After a moment’s reflection, he added, “Still have no bloody clue how to do it, of course.” He had been so focused on grappling with the moral dilemma that he hadn’t spared a thought for the logistics. He was not exactly welcome in Hell, and even less so in Heaven. Death had been rather vague about the location of each of the escape hatches and the mechanisms by which they opened. But that probably didn’t matter, as Crowley would no doubt be captured and killed before he ever found them anyway. The thought relaxed him a bit. Heading into an impossible mission was psychologically easier than going into a merely difficult one.

“You should take that guidebook with you,” Adam said, nodding toward the Bentley.

“ _Lonely Planet Europe_?” Crowley shrugged. It had already proved itself useful beyond anything that could reasonably be expected of it. “Sure, why not?”

Adam appeared to be struggling a bit with his next decision. “And you can take Dog,” he finally said.

“Er, thanks for the offer,” Crowley said, looking at Dog, who had been chasing his own tail for the duration of their conversation and had just fallen dizzily to the ground. “But I don’t see what use I’ll have for a –” Uncharacteristically, Crowley was trying to be diplomatic, in gratitude for Adam serving as his sounding board. “—For a dog,” he finished politely.

“You can’t do it without him,” Adam said with that quiet certainty he sometimes had that seemed to make all of reality sit up a bit straighter and take notice.

“All right, then,” Crowley said, seeing the futility in arguing the point.

Adam knelt next to Dog and scratched his ears. Dog licked his face. “You be a good boy,” Adam said to his dog. Then he looked at Crowley. “Make sure he’s on this side when the divide closes.”

“Sure thing.” Crowley opened the passenger door to the Bentley, and Dog jumped into the passenger seat, excited as always to go for a ride.

Crowley opened his door, prepared to get in, but he paused and looked at Adam. “If I don’t come back, tell Aziraphale –” Crowley thought about what he wanted Adam to tell Aziraphale. He didn’t want to say _I did this for you_ , no matter how true it was, because that would be the last thing Aziraphale would want to hear, even if he already knew it. He didn’t want to say _I’m sorry_ either, because there were a lot of things he was sorry for and a lot of others for which he wasn’t. What he really wanted to say was how he felt about Aziraphale, just in case the angel somehow really didn’t know, but there were only so many ways Crowley could say things like that. So he finally settled on, “Tell him he’s a bastard. Just enough of one. Got it?”

Adam nodded, and Crowley said gruffly, “I’ll see that your dog makes it back safe.”

Crowley got into the Bentley and drove off. He rolled down the passenger side window so that Dog could stick his head out and feel the wind blow through his ears.

Hell had to be his first destination. It was a marginally easier target than Heaven, because he was at least familiar with the layout of the place, and it wasn’t nearly as well guarded.† He might actually have a shot at releasing the souls from Hell, which even Aziraphale hadn’t been able to mount much of an objection to, since those souls were objectively not having a good time. Once that was accomplished, Crowley would no doubt be captured, maybe before escaping Hell, certainly upon arrival in Heaven, but at least he would have done some damage. That way, he didn’t have to worry too much about the morally ambiguous task of releasing the souls from Heaven, because there was no way he would be able to survive long enough to do it anyway. With that cheerful thought, Crowley mentally switched on his inward Hell-locating homing beacon and followed the sensation toward the nearest Down escalator.

* * *

*Technically, they argued all the time. But, as with floods and earthquakes, the frequency and severity of their arguments were inversely correlated. Level I arguments, a near-daily occurrence, were for their mutual entertainment only. Level II arguments, in which each of them tried to challenge the other’s beliefs and usually ended up challenging their own in the process, were also very common. Less common were Level III arguments, in which one of them genuinely annoyed the other, sometimes not immediately realizing that the annoyance was genuine, hence amplifying said annoyance. Rarer still were Level IV arguments, when one of them unintentionally hurt the other’s feelings and the injured party was in a snit about it. The number of Level V arguments they had had over the millennia could be counted on one hand. This latest row had been a Level V argument.

**In the oldest surviving written work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Siduri, a fermentation goddess, advised, “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night … These things alone are the concern of man.” As far as Crowley was concerned, that statement represented the apex of human moral philosophy, and it had all gone downhill from there.

***Like being colorblind, but instead of being able to distinguish red from green, you see everything in ethical shades of grey.

†Hell does not bother to invest in much security, instead relying on reputation alone. It’s kind of like a house that puts out a sign saying “Protected by such-and-such security service” without having actually installed the advertised security system.


	10. Chapter 10

After the sound of the departing Bentley’s engine had faded into silence, Aziraphale let the tears come. He wished he had called Crowley back. He would have gladly kept arguing with him all day, just to keep him from leaving.

But Aziraphale had, of course, said the worst possible thing he could say. It was ridiculously easy for him to hurt Crowley with his words, and it was a power he had wielded several times over the years only to immediately regret it. Now, he had done it again. What he had said wasn’t even true. He _knew_ Crowley loved him, as clearly as he knew anything. It was something Crowley had shown in a million ways, big and small, over the millennia. It was in the way Crowley smiled at him, called him _angel_ , teased him, laughed with him, looked for excuses to spend time with him, brought him sweets, got drunk with him, got vulnerable with him, saved him from embarrassment and despair and disincorporation and death. By saying _you don’t really care about me_ , Aziraphale had dismissed all of that as if it meant nothing.

It was something he had never really thought about before, but the realization hit Aziraphale now that his friendship with Crowley must be the longest one in the history of the world. The longest friendship would have to be between immortal beings, for obvious reasons, and most immortal beings weren’t really into having friends.* But he and Crowley had known each other nearly since the Beginning, and they had been friends for nearly that whole time, since long before either of them would have admitted it. Maybe friendships weren’t meant to last that long. Maybe, at a certain point, it became impossible to delude oneself about who the other person really was, which must be a necessary part of any lasting relationship. At the end of the day, Crowley was a demon, and Aziraphale was an angel, and even if they both came closer to the middle than any others of their kind, there was still a wide gulf between them. For centuries now, Aziraphale had sincerely believed that Crowley was good. He had seen Crowley do so many selfless and kind and thoughtful things, even if they were always camouflaged beneath a layer of outward unpleasantness, that it was impossible to believe that he was evil like demons were supposed to be. But maybe Crowley wasn’t really good. Maybe it was doing Crowley a disservice to expect him to be something that he just wasn’t. He wasn’t someone who would put the fate of billions of anonymous human souls above what he loved, which was Aziraphale and himself and the life they shared. That didn’t make him evil, but it didn’t make him good either. Maybe it was the whole concept of good and evil that had to go. Maybe Nietzsche had been onto something.

Aziraphale tried to turn his thoughts down a different track.** Now that he was out of the heat of the argument, he wondered if Crowley had been right that there was nothing wrong, per se, with consigning human souls to oblivion. Aziraphale had waved away the point that half those souls were currently writhing in agony in Hell, which in retrospect was a fair point that probably shouldn’t be waved away so lightly. But would the good of releasing those souls from their torment, if it really was a good thing, outweigh what Aziraphale had to believe was the evil of destroying souls that were enjoying their endless holiday in Heaven? Would each soul saved from Hell be balanced by a soul forsaken from Heaven? Aziraphale didn’t know how to do the maths on that one.***

Just then, Newt, Anathema, and the children reentered the cottage. Anathema silently handed Aziraphale a tissue, and he dabbed at his eyes.

“So, he left, then?” Newt asked. It was obvious that Crowley had left, as the Pulsifer-Devices would have been able to hear the Bentley leaving, but Aziraphale knew that humans sometimes felt the need to ask questions that they already knew the answers to.

“Yes, he left.”

“Where did he go?” Newt asked.

“I don’t know. He’ll come back.” Aziraphale tried to reassure himself with his own words. Crowley always did come back, after all. “Newt,” Aziraphale added. “You were saying something about how you felt as a human about this whole soul thing, before Crowley rudely interrupted you. I’d be very interested to hear what you were going to say.”

“Oh,” Newt said, looking gratified that someone was taking an interest in his opinion. “Well, I was just going to say, Heaven sounds great if it really is eternal bliss, like you were saying. But eternal bliss sounds kind of like a marketing slogan. You know, like _All natural_ or _Satisfaction guaranteed_.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “It’s not a marketing slogan. All the marketing people are in Hell.”

“But I don’t even know if eternal bliss is possible,” Newt said. “I mean, eternal? Really? No matter how blissful it is, it seems like it would get boring after a while.”

“It’s everything you could want,” Aziraphale said, a bit indignant on behalf of his former employer. “I mean, the music is rather uninspired, and the décor, and nothing ever happens. But humans like that sort of thing. At least the sort of humans who go to Heaven do.”

“It sounds like being in a zoo.”

“Or worse, Disneyland,” added Anathema, who as a native Californian had spent a fair amount of her childhood in the Magic Kingdom.

“The souls there have everything they want,” Aziraphale said. “If that doesn’t make them happy, what would?”

“Having everything you want doesn’t make you happy,” Newt said. “Then you just want something else. It’s in the wanting and the striving to get it that happiness comes from.”

Aziraphale stared blankly. That was so completely irrational and self-defeating that it had all the hallmarks of what he had come to expect from humanity. “What about you, Anathema?” Aziraphale asked, seeking a second opinion. “What do you think?”

“Well, as someone whose ticket is already punched for Hell, I vote for oblivion,” Anathema said.

“What do you mean?” Newt asked. “You’re a good person. You heal people, and help them with their problems, and give them confidence –”

“Yes, but I do all that using witchcraft. Evil witchcraft.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to Hell –”

“Er, sorry, but it does,” Aziraphale said, now feeling even more terrible than he already had. “Heaven’s policies are very strict on that sort of thing. The idea is that magic should be reserved for divine beings, so use of magic by humans is sacrilege. You’ll be automatically turned back at the pearly gates† for that.”

“Well, then I don’t want to go to Heaven either,” Newt said, aghast. “The whole reason I’d want to go there is so we could be together, me and Anathema and my parents, and the kids when it’s their time.”

“It doesn’t matter where you _want_ to go,” Aziraphale said. “You’re just assigned to one or the other based on your deeds and character.”

“Well, maybe that’s a whole system that needs dismantling,” Newt said rebelliously.

“But if it’s dismantled, then you won’t _exist_ after you die _,_ ” Aziraphale said. “Isn’t that worse?”

“Not really,” Anathema said. “I mean, if you don’t exist, there’s nothing to worry about, right?”

“Yes, but …” Aziraphale wondered if he really was in the wrong about this. He was having a hard time articulating just what he found so horrifying about the prospect of destroying the souls, so he turned to Kant’s perfect duty to articulate it for him. “We’re talking about this in terms of the outcomes. That we would be better off and humanity would be better off if Heaven and Hell were cut off from Earth, that human souls might be better off in oblivion rather than in an afterlife. But that’s treating those souls as means to an end. We have a perfect duty to not use humanity as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Each of those 107 billion souls is unique. We didn’t create them, and we don’t have the right to destroy them for our own ends.”

Newt and Anathema looked indecisive. “It’s a tough call,” Newt said. “I suppose we need to think about it some more.”

So Aziraphale made them all tea so they would have something to sip thoughtfully while they weighed their moral options. Aziraphale kept one ear open for the sound of the Bentley returning, telling himself he would hear it any moment now, marshalling his arguments for when Crowley returned. This time, he would stay calm and not make it personal. He could quote some Kant. That would make Crowley roll his eyes but stay calm too. Aziraphale stirred his tea, leafing through his mental volume of _Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals_ to pick out the strongest bits. In the back of his mind, he propped a door open, willing to be convinced if Crowley made a more compelling argument. They had both changed their minds about things before, after all.

Restless, Newt flipped on the telly. All that was on was an infomercial for an immersion blender, but it was quickly interrupted by a newscast as the station abruptly realized that there were things even more important than immersion blending going on in the world. “ _We interrupt this broadcast with this breaking news_ ,” the newscaster said. “ _Mass civil unrest has broken out in London, and we are getting similar reports from other cities around the world. The primary agitators appear to be a loosely organized group of conspiracy theorists who allege that yesterday’s so-called zombie attack was the result of vaccines, or 5G mobile networks, or chemtrails, or some combination thereof. At the same time, new cults have sprung up overnight, espousing beliefs that the so-called Rapture and so-called zombie apocalypse are signs of the End Times. In the US state of Florida, one of these new cults has already conducted a ritual mass suicide. Their online materials indicate their belief that, after death, a UFO would carry their spirits to Heaven for a rendezvous with Jesus. Authorities are urging the public to stay at home and, for the sake of human civilization, to keep off social media no matter how hilarious the zombie memes are –”_

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said. “It’s happening. Above and Below have precipitated a crisis of faith. Now humanity is cowering like frightened children.”

“I always knew social media would be the downfall of civilization,” Newt said, eyes wide.

“We all knew that,” Anathema said. “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said worriedly, wishing that Crowley would just come back already. Crowley was always much better at scheming. No doubt the uptick in global tensions meant that Crowley would be more determined than ever to go through with his plan to blow up the whole system, but Aziraphale would be willing to have that argument again and maybe to lose it this time.

There was a sound from outside, but it wasn’t the Bentley. Instead, it was the cheery sound of a bicycle bell. A moment later, there was a knock at the door. Newt got up and opened it.

“Hello, Adam,” he said, letting the teenage Antichrist in. “Have you been paying attention to the news? Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.”‡

“Speaking of Hell,” Adam said, which is never an auspicious way to begin a sentence. “Crowley went down there to release the souls. I figured you’d want to know.”

“What?” Aziraphale felt as though his stomach had dropped off a cliff. “No, he – he wouldn’t try to do that by himself –”

“He’s not by himself. He’s got Dog. And _Lonely Planet Europe_.”

Aziraphale boggled in speechless horror. This was an outcome that he had not foreseen. He had thought, if nothing else, he could count on Crowley’s well-developed sense of self-preservation. Going to release the souls on his own was a suicide mission.

“What about the souls in Heaven?” Newt asked. “Won’t he have to release those too in order for the whole thing to work?”

“He’s going there next,” Adam said casually. “Made sense to take care of the ones in Hell first, since it’s easier. And they’ve been suffering for long enough anyway.”

“Heaven?” Aziraphale asked in disbelief. “He won’t even be able to get in the door. They’ll grab him and then they’ll –” He stopped speaking, unwilling to think about what Heaven would do to a demon trying to break in. Especially if that demon was Crowley, who was already disliked Upstairs. If releasing the souls from Hell was a suicide mission, then attempting to do the same from Heaven was, well, something even more hopeless than a suicide mission, whatever that was.

“He must have some sort of plan,” Anathema said. “I mean, he’s not an idiot.”

“What did he say to you, exactly?” Aziraphale demanded of Adam.

“Well, he waffled for a bit about what to do. Sort of like you’re all doing now. He wanted me to tell him what to do. But I told him he had to make his own choice, and he said he knew what to do now. I told him to take the guidebook with him, and Dog. Then he drove off.”

“You should have stopped him,” Aziraphale said, distraught. “Or at least called me so I could come down and stop him –”

“I’m not about stopping people from doing things. Free will and all that.”

“I know, but – he shouldn’t be going alone.” _I should be with him_ was the thought that kept chanting at Aziraphale like a mantra. “Did he say anything else?”

“He said to tell you you’re a bastard.” Adam grinned at Aziraphale. “Just enough of one, he said.”

“Well, that’s a bit rude,” Newt muttered.

“He meant it affectionately,” Aziraphale explained. That was the closest Crowley ever came to expressing his feelings. The words called up the memory in Aziraphale’s mind of Crowley standing beside the charred ruins of the Bentley, tire iron in hand, ready to face Satan. He could imagine Crowley with that same look of resigned determination, expecting to lose but willing to give it a go anyway, down in the pits of Hell or at the gates of Heaven. He could imagine Crowley being desperate enough to end Above and Below’s interference once and for all that he would grab a metaphorical tire iron and once again stand against impossible odds. The only difference was that this time he was standing alone. And despite the cloud of moral confusion that Aziraphale was currently lost in, one thing he was very clear on was that Crowley standing alone against impossible odds was Wrong. _I should be with him_ , Aziraphale thought again. With that thought, a idea devious enough to be worthy of being called a scheme sprang fully formed into his mind. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be fun, and it probably wouldn’t even work, but it was the best idea he had.

“Newt,” Aziraphale said. “Might I trouble you for a ride?”

* * *

*This is because most immortal beings are insufferable even to other immortal beings.

**To Aziraphale, the thought _Maybe Nietzsche had been onto something_ was like a flashing _Wrong Way_ _– Do Not Enter_ sign on a motorway.

***Moral calculus is a notoriously tricky branch of mathematics. Bentham’s system is charmingly called felicific calculus or, more provocatively, hedonistic calculus, which sounds like something naughty you can do with a slide rule. Each calculation involves seven vectors: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent. Some of those vectors also sound naughty, but they’re not. At least, not necessarily. Units of pleasure and displeasure are known as hedons and dolors, respectively. The order of magnitude of total pleasure and displeasure among all human souls in Heaven and Hell was in petahedons and petadolors, which means you would need a supercomputer to crank through the needed felicific calculations. Needless to say, Aziraphale did not have a supercomputer and would not have known what to do with one if he did have it.

†Contrary to popular belief, Heaven’s gates are not actually pearly, but are instead covered with a rather tacky gold leaf. But Above’s employees still use the colloquialism to refer to the entrance by which human souls access Heaven.

‡Down Below, there’s a little side room between the first and second circles where they keep all the handbaskets that have been used to transport things to Hell.


	11. Chapter 11

Crowley stared at the entrance to the shopping mall as if it were the mouth of Hell. It wasn’t. The mouth of Hell was a bit further inside. But Crowley knew that, once he arrived at the actual mouth of Hell, he wouldn’t be able to risk staring at it lest he lose his nerve and abandon the whole mission. So he stood and stared at the cheery entrance to the shopping mall instead, gathering his nerves.

He felt the inside of his jacket pocket. _Lonely Planet Europe_ was safely tucked away there. He looked at Dog, and Dog looked back, tongue lolling out. Crowley manifested a leash for Dog and attached it to his collar. He didn’t want the dog running off while they were Down Below, not when he had promised Adam that he would make sure he got the silly creature back safely. Even though Dog had been sitting calmly, the moment Crowley attached the leash, the dog started pulling against it, as if rebelling against being constrained. “I know how you feel,” Crowley muttered to Dog. Then, his nerves gathered inasmuch as they could be gathered, Crowley took a deep breath and entered the mall, Dog running back and forth beside him as far as his leash would allow.

As they walked, a security guard looked as though he was about to object to the presence of the dog in the pet-free environs of the mall. But upon getting a better look at Crowley’s face, which clearly broadcast the general intent of not the specific message of _I’m about to walk into Hell itself and destroy it from within_ , the guard wisely decided that he hadn’t seen a dog at all.*

Crowley arrived in the creepy abandoned section found in every mall, where there was nothing but vacant storefronts and the ghosts of commerce past. There he saw the true mouth of Hell, which was an escalator. Well, not _the_ true mouth of Hell, _a_ mouth. Hell had many mouths, allowing its operatives easy access to Earth to tempt and otherwise bother humans. Like most hellmouths, this one was an escalator. It was the one that went Down, obviously. Next to it was the Up escalator, ascending to the holier-than-thou heights of Heaven.

Not sparing even a moment to contemplate what he was doing, Crowley headed straight to the Down escalator and got on it. It moved, slowly, inexorably, Downward. Crowley had never enjoyed this escalator ride, because even when he was on the payroll he had stayed out of the office as much as possible. No good ever came from more facetime with the bosses. Now it had been a few years since he had been Downstairs, and he was enjoying the ride even less than usual. One way or another, he consoled himself, this would be the last time.

By the time Crowley stepped off the escalator, he was almost shaking with nervousness that someone would try to stop him and would in all likelihood succeed. As a rule, Hell’s entrance was not guarded, but Crowley had been in Hell’s bad books, the only kind of books Hell had, for long enough now that he half-expected some sort of alarm to go off announcing his arrival. But it didn’t. Several demons were hanging around Hell’s lobby, which was just as sleek and sterile as the lobby of any major corporate headquarters. The demons turned to look at Crowley, but then quickly turned away. At first Crowley thought maybe they were intimidated by him, the demon who had stood up to management, but then he heard a low growl coming from behind him and turned to see that it wasn’t him they were intimidated by.

Crowley had dragged Dog onto the escalator one step behind him, but the floppy-eared and floppy-tongued and floppy-minded creature who had gotten on at the top of the escalator had transformed into something else by the bottom of it. Now there was nothing floppy about Dog. He was now large enough that he could have swallowed the old version of himself whole. He had the sinewy muscle of a greyhound, the snarling maw of a pitbull, and the steely glare of a wolf. He was black as night, his eyes glowed red, and saliva dripped from his snout. As he pulled back his lip to expose his bone-piercingly sharp teeth, he let out another growl, and it rumbled like a volcano waking with a hangover. Crowley swore he could even see a flicker of what might have been hellfire flare with the dog’s breath. Apparently, being back in his native habitat had turned Dog into a proper hellhound.

Crowley grinned. All the demons in the lobby were giving him a wide berth. Even demons were afraid of hellhounds. They had reason to be, as hellhounds were known to be none too particular about whose throat they tore out. Adam had been right about that dog of his not being useless after all. As long as he had Dog with him, Crowley might actually stand a chance of moving unimpeded through Hell long enough to complete his mission.

“Good boy,” Crowley said, scratching Dog’s ears. Dog wagged his tail happily but then abruptly stopped, remembering that proper hellhounds didn’t wag their tails happily. 

Crowley wondered which way he should go. He was reasonably familiar with Hell’s layout, but he didn’t recall seeing anything that resembled an escape hatch for human souls. Of course, that was probably not something they advertised. He pulled out _Lonely Planet Europe_ and opened it, assuming that its mysterious powers extended Down Below. Hell might not be geographically part of Europe, but it was unmistakably European nonetheless.

 _Hell_ , the book read. _An up-and-coming destination for the most adventurous travelers. Some call it the new Los Angeles_ ** _, with a warm climate, opportunities to spot celebrities, and experiences that, let’s just say, you can’t get anywhere else. Let’s see, you’re looking for the escape hatch Death installed to release all the condemned souls? Well, that’s a bit of a trek from here. All the way down in the ninth circle._

“The _ninth_ circle?” Crowley said aloud. He had never been lower than the fifth.

_Don’t worry, there’s plenty to see along the way. Traveling is all about the journey, not the destination—_

“I used to work here, I’ve seen more than enough of the place,” Crowley muttered at the book. Having learned what he needed to know for now, he closed it and stuffed it back in his jacket.

Crowley looked around at the lobby. Demons were still avoiding him or, more precisely, avoiding his hellhound companion. He could only hope that would keep up all the way down to the ninth circle. As if on cue, the giant electronic marquee sign that had been installed a few years ago in Hell’s lobby flashed its standard greeting, _Abandon all hope, ye who enter here._ Crowley glared at the sign. It transitioned to its next message, which was _Also abandon your mobile phones at the front desk. Ye are not permitted to bring them past the lobby_.

Crowley set off for the main corridor that led to the administrative offices, his usual destination when he had come Downstairs as an employee. Despite the corridor’s main function of providing access for field agents to report to their superiors, there were always a few condemned souls loitering around in it. These were the Uncommitted, the people who were neither good nor evil but had been merely looking out for number one. Crowley felt a certain kinship with those souls, as he shared their general outlook on life, but he had always wished that Hell had found a better place to stick them. Apparently, they weren’t good enough to qualify for Limbo or evil enough for one of the lower circles, so by default they were relegated to an eternity of hanging out in the corridor, as befitted their Uncommitted status. Anyone walking down that corridor had to dodge the Uncommitted souls, who were constantly rushing around naked in pursuit of an elusive banner, chased by wasps and hornets, with maggots and worms at their feet drinking the blood and pus flowing down their bodies.*** And those were the souls who hadn’t sinned in a way that was specific enough to merit a _real_ punishment. Crowley remembered how, at every staff meeting, someone would bring up how it was hard to get work done with the Uncommitted souls screaming and running around, and management would always say they were looking into adding an expansion so they would have somewhere else to put them. Crowley was not surprised in the least that they were still kicking that can down the road.

Weaving his way through the Uncommitted souls and the swarms of stinging insects that always followed them, Crowley turned off onto another corridor, away from his old path toward the administrative offices. This other corridor led to the dark heart of Hell, the nine circles of the pit. As a field agent, Crowley had had little reason to visit the pit, and he had only been there a handful of times. But it was in the pit that the vast majority of Hell’s massive workforce was stationed. It made sense that the soul escape hatch was there, as that was also where most of the condemned souls were housed, and on reflection it was a good thing. Crowley was much less likely to run into someone he knew in the pit, and all the demons who worked there were kept so busy meeting their torture quotas that they might not even notice his presence.

The corridor abruptly terminated at the Acheron, the River of Woe. It was a wide river, flowing through a cavernous opening. Crowley headed for the bridge, which had been built in the Thirties as a union-busting move after the ferrymen went on strike. Crossing the modernist steel bridge, Crowley looked down at the woeful waters that, once crossed by a human soul, could never be crossed again. Then he was across the bridge and at the edge of the pit.

The pit was a deep depression, and that was also the state of mind it inspired in its inhabitants. It must have been miles across, too wide to see to the other side. It was shaped like a funnel, with nine concentric circles cut into it, each of smaller diameter than the last. The demons who ran this part of Hell, who had little knowledge or experience of Earth other than the sounds of terror and pain made by humans, were quite old-fashioned. As a result, there had been little modernization past the Acheron bridge. There was no escalator leading down into the pit, just stone steps cut into the sides. To make matters worse, the pit was an official no-fly zone. The flight ban was ostensibly in place to preserve the airspace for the guards who patrolled the various circles, but there was widespread belief in the ranks that the real reason was morale. That is, the bosses could boost their own morale by ordering their subordinates to go trudge down through the pit on pointless errands. Crowley remembered how, back in the fifteenth century, his supervisor had ordered him to hand-deliver a memo to a colleague down in the fifth circle. It had taken seemingly forever to make it all the way down the stone steps to the fifth circle, and then twice as long to get back up. Now Crowley was going to have to go down even more steps, all the way to the ninth circle, before climbing back up, assuming he survived.

Resigned to his fate of having sore legs, if not a much worse fate, Crowley walked over to the edge of the pit so he could begin the descent. The outer rim, where he was now, was the first circle, otherwise known as Limbo. This was where the upbaptized and the virtuous pagans were sent. Crowley remembered having an argument with Aziraphale about that. How, Crowley had asked, was it just for Heaven to refuse to take in good people who hadn’t had a chance at salvation through no fault of their own, just because they had been born too early in history or in the wrong part of the world and therefore hadn’t had the Bible shoved down their throats? Or, even worse, how could Heaven refuse to take in the souls of babies who hadn’t even had a chance to enjoying the fun of sinning, just because they had died before being baptized? Aziraphale had looked uncomfortable, as he always did when he found Crowley’s arguments convincing, but he had said something about how Limbo barely even qualified as part of Hell. That was true. The accommodations here were pretty decent by Hell’s standards. Now, as Crowley began descending the stone steps, he could see, perched on the rim of the pit, the great seven-gated castle where the wise men and women of antiquity hung out, Homer and Aristotle and Euclid and Ptolemy and the whole gang. They had a millennia-long party going on in that castle, with lots of philosophizing and playing of music and reciting of poetry. Crowley thought wistfully of how much Aziraphale would love to join that party. Of course, he would never have the chance. Even apart from the fact that the virtuous pagans were stuck in Limbo, which was within Hell’s borders no matter how nice the digs were, Crowley was about to ruin the party by consigning all those wise ancient souls to oblivion. He felt a pang of something or other at that and forced himself to push the thought away.

After a long descent, Crowley reached the second circle. Its arrival was heralded by the serpent monster Minos, who crouched on the rim of the circle next to the steps. Minos’s job was to judge the condemned souls, the ones who had really gone out of their way to sin rather than just being Uncommitted or unbaptized or ignorant. He would wrap his tail around himself a number of times to indicate the number of the circle the soul was destined for. Crowley cringed a bit as he passed by Minos but, perhaps recognizing a fellow serpent, the monster just raised his hand in the way a lorry driver lifts his fingers from the steering wheel in acknowledgement of another lorry driver passing by in the opposite direction. Crowley raised his hand as well, one professional to another, and he and Dog were allowed to pass.

Now Crowley was in the second circle, where those guilty of the carnal sin of lust were condemned. The punishment here was relatively mild, as the sin was one of mutual indulgence. After all, it takes two to tango. The souls here were buffeted back and forth by a constant wind, forever drifting in the storm of their passion. Crowley had to dodge a couple of lustful souls who were almost blown into him. He recognized some familiar faces – Paris and Helen of Troy, Achilles and Patroclus, Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde. Each pair of lovers reached out for each other as they were tossed back and forth by the winds, occasionally managing to brush their fingers together before being violently ripped apart again. It was like a strangely sensuous dance. Looking at their faces, Crowley concluded that the souls here didn’t have it so bad, despite the nasty weather. At least each of them was condemned alongside their beloved. Thinking of Aziraphale again, Crowley felt that he could understand the plight of all those star-crossed lovers. Not that there was any lust per se involved in their case, but it seemed that what made all those relationships sinful was less about their carnal relations and more about their all-consuming nature. That last bit was something Crowley could relate to.

The third circle was next, where the souls of the gluttonous were condemned. The weather here was even worse than in the second circle. There was a constant drizzling rain, like the one that often falls in London. Unlike most London rains, however, this was a rain of putrefaction. What was falling was not water but some sort of foul and rotting substance, like what would fall from a cloud made of swamp mud. The smell was enough to make even the most ravenous glutton lose their appetite. The punishment seemed like quite an overreaction to what was essentially a victimless crime. Yet again, Crowley was reminded of Aziraphale, who had stolen more sweets off his plate than could be counted.

As if the putrefying rain weren’t enough, this circle had its own monster guard, the giant three-headed dog Cerberus. The gluttonous souls wallowed and writhed in the stinking muck while Cerberus prowled around and occasionally swiped at them with his claws. As Crowley and Dog continued down the stairs as quickly but casually as they could manage, Cerberus caught wind of Dog and turned to face them, growling. Crowley froze in terror, wondering which of the three heads would be the one to eat him. But Dog, in Hell just as on Earth, seemed to have no concept of his own relative size. Apparently unaware that Cerberus had five hundred pounds and two heads on him, Dog curled his lip and issued his own growl. It was a respectable growl, but it paled in comparison to the earth-shaking one Cerberus had just produced. If he weren’t frozen in terror, Crowley would have laughed at how inadequate the matchup was. But Cerberus seemed satisfied and turned away, going back to his job of clawing at the muck-mired souls. Crowley realized that he had just witnessed the canine equivalent of the half-wave he and Minos had exchanged on the second circle. Unfreezing himself, Crowley tugged on Dog’s leash and hurried down the steps.

The fourth circle was home to the souls condemned by greed. They came in two flavors, those who hoarded possessions and those who squandered them. The greedy had been Crowley’s favorite marks as a tempter, so there were more than a few souls who were here because of him. Well, because of their own greed, really. All Crowley had done was give them a little push. That was something else he and Aziraphale had argued about. Crowley had said, half-seriously, that he was doing the world a favor by tempting the rich and powerful, because they were terrible people anyway and at least this way they would end up getting the punishment in Hell that no one seemed willing or able to give them on Earth. Aziraphale had countered that Crowley was encouraging them to give in to their own worst impulses and making them go further than they would on their own. Crowley had laughed at that and asked if Aziraphale had ever even met a hedge-fund manager. Aziraphale hadn’t. Crowley had explained that these were people who didn’t need any help giving in to their own worst impulses, as those were the only impulses they had. All Crowley was doing was encouraging them to do the terrible things they were going to do anyway so that he could count them toward his monthly temptation quota. The argument had ended, as most of their arguments did, when the two of them had consumed enough wine that neither could remember what they had been arguing about and had agreed to disagree about whatever it was they were disagreeing about.

Here, in the fourth circle, the punishment for the greedy souls was to push giant bags of money back and forth. Gold coins, from the look of it, as paper money or credit cards wouldn’t have been heavy enough to count as a sufficient punishment. At least the weather had improved from the second and third circles.

The fourth circle also had a guard, but this one was considerably less monstrous than the previous two. He was a young man, dressed in the classical garb of ancient Greece. This was Plutus, the Greek god of wealth. As Aristophanes had written, the god of wealth was lame, so he took his time arriving, and winged, so he left faster than he came. He was also blind, supposedly so that he would distribute his gifts without prejudice, although that didn’t seem consistent with the distribution of wealth that Crowley had observed on Earth. Still, a blind guard suited Crowley just fine. He slowed down as he approached Plutus, with the aim of sneaking past him undetected.

“ _Pap_ _é Sat_ _àn, pap_ _é Sat_ _àn aleppe_ ,” Plutus said suddenly as Crowley came within arm’s reach of him.

“What?” Crowley asked, confused.

“What?” Plutus also said, turning his blind face toward Crowley.

“You said something to me,” Crowley said, wondering if maybe the god of wealth hadn’t been addressing him at all. “I didn’t understand it. What does it mean?”

Now Plutus seemed equally confused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been saying that to everyone who goes by for centuries. You’re the first person to ask what it means.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Crowley said weakly, tugging on Dog’s leash to hurry him along away from the god who had clearly been down in the pit for too long.

They reached the fifth circle, which was the deepest Crowley had ever been in the pit on his previous excursions. Here was another of Hell’s great underworld rivers, the dark and dismal river Styx. It looked and smelled like some of the more polluted waterways Crowley had seen on Earth. The wrathful were condemned to spend eternity in its stinking and slimy waters. Like the greedy, the wrathful also came in two varieties. There were the passive-aggressive types, who sulked sullenly beneath the water’s surface, and the aggressive-aggressive types, who splashed around in the water trying to drown each other or claw each other’s eyes out. Overhead, the Furies flew on patrol. These three winged sisters looked a bit like angels, but specifically like angels who would beat up other angels in the schoolyard.

Crowley had a problem now. The Styx ran completely around the circumference of the fifth circle. He had never crossed it before, having had neither the necessity nor the inclination to do so. But he had to cross it now to get to the lower circles. This being the antiquated part of Hell, there was no bridge crossing the Styx. He eyed the water, which was black and thick as oil and was also filled with writhing wrathful souls, and he decided that wading was right out. That left the ferry.

The stone steps petered out at the dock, where the boat was tethered. Sitting in it was the ferryman, who looked as bored and surly as any public transit worker on Earth.

“I need passage across,” Crowley said to the ferryman. “For me and my dog.”

“Two gold coins for you, one for the dog,” the ferryman said.

“Er, I’m fresh out of gold coins,” Crowley said. He fumbled around in his pockets. He didn’t usually carry cash, as on Earth he could miraculously counterfeit it if he needed to. “I don’t suppose you take American Express?”

The ferryman blinked at him. “No gold coins, no passage.”

“I’m here on official business from the head office,” Crowley tried. “They’ll be displeased if they find out you impeded the successful completion of my mission.” He supposed if all else failed, he could head back up to the fourth circle and nick some gold coins from the money bags being pushed around by the greedy souls, but he really didn’t want to do any more climbing than was absolutely necessary.

“Then they should have sent you with the proper fare,” the ferryman said. “Typical of those white-collar management types, thinking they can just order us working folk around without even compensating us for our labor. I mean, do they want another ferrymen’s strike on their hands? We can shut this whole operation down, no problem. We’ll see how high and mighty they are once the most wicked souls start piling up in their corner offices with no one to transport them across the old River Stinks.”

“Hey, I’m just a working bloke myself,” Crowley said, going for the labor solidarity angle. “I go where they send me and do what I’m told. You think you could help out a fellow working stiff? I don’t have time to go all the way back to the office and get the fare, and if I don’t pick up these forms from the seventh circle by close of business, the boss will have my head.” Hell was the sort of hostile working environment where those kinds of comments could be taken literally.

“Well,” the ferrymen said slowly, “maybe we could work out a trade.”

“What do you want?” The only things of value Crowley had with him were the dog and the guidebook, and they were mission-critical.

“Those things on your face,” the ferryman said immediately.

“My sunglasses?” Crowley had forgotten that they were something else he had that was of value. He tended to think of them as part of his face. “These are designer frames. They’re worth way more than three gold coins –”

“No _sun-glasses_ ,” the ferryman said, clearly enunciating the unfamiliar word as he probably had no idea what the sun was, “no passage.”

“Fine,” Crowley said, reluctantly taking off the shades and handing them over. He was probably going to die soon anyway and would therefore have no further need for sunglasses, but that wasn’t even a consoling thought because now he wouldn’t have his sunglasses to die in. The ferryman put on the glasses and motioned for Crowley and Dog to enter the boat. As they pushed off from shore, Crowley noted with irritation that the ferryman now had a certain swagger, like he could suddenly play blues guitar. He clearly considered himself the coolest-looking ferryman in all of Hell. The most irritating thing was that he was right. Crowley felt betrayed by his sunglasses. They were supposed to make _him_ look cool, not other people.

As the coolest-looking ferryman in all of Hell rowed them across the Styx, Crowley idly took out _Lonely Planet Europe_ and flipped it open so that he would have something else to look at. He was in terra incognita now, so he figured he might as well check to see whether the book had anything useful to tell him about where he was going. Besides, he felt, well, lonely. He wanted someone to talk to, and the specific someone he wanted to talk to might never talk to him again. _Lonely Planet Europe_ , however, was capable of engaging in the functional equivalent of conversation. It was a snarky interlocutor, to be sure. If the book were a person, Crowley would have surely punched it in the face by now. But, even so, he and Aziraphale had had some good times with _Lonely Planet Europe_ , and that made Crowley feel something like fondness toward the book despite its personality defects. It was the closest thing he had to a friend down here in the pit.

 _All right, Dante,_ the guidebook read. _I’ll be your Virgil._ Crowley scowled, already annoyed at the book’s cheery tone, but kept reading anyway. _Here we are on the River Styx_. _Its headwaters are the tears of mortals and its course follows that of nightmares. Swimming or other forms of recreation are not recommended. Don’t forget to bring gold coins for the ferry, exact change only – oh, never mind, too late. Anyway, the sixth circle is next up. Guess what the theme of that circle is? Go ahead, guess._

Crowley tried to remember. After the Styx, all the carnal sins were done, and the remaining circles were the more serious offenses. They were, in effect, moving to the higher-security wing of the prison. But he couldn’t remember what all the more serious offenses were or what order they came in. He hadn’t ever really needed to know about them, since he had mostly stuck to the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, in his temptations.

 _It’s heresy!_ The book spelled out excitedly. _That’s a classic. For example, Epicurus and his followers are condemned in the sixth circle because they taught that the soul dies with the body. Must have been a rude awakening for old Epicurus to find his soul down here after death, eh?_

Crowley tried not to reflect on how suddenly correct Epicurus and his followers were going to be, assuming the successful completion of the mission. Too bad the Epicureans wouldn’t get to enjoy an _I told you so_.

As they reached the far bank of the Styx, Crowley shot one last disapproving glare at the coolest-looking ferryman in all of Hell, silently bidding his sunglasses goodbye. Then he disembarked, Dog’s leash in one hand and _Lonely Planet Europe_ in the other. He made his way through the sixth circle, whose main attraction seemed to be a set of flaming tombs in which the heretics were encased. _Lonely Planet Europe_ doubtlessly had all sorts of fun facts to share, but Crowley was not the least bit interested in reading them. Ever since Aziraphale’s close call with hellfire, Crowley had been even less inclined than before to watch people burn. So he hurried through the tombs, trying not to look at them. Suddenly, he realized that he had been so busy not looking at the flaming tombs that he had also not looked for any guards. Every circle apparently had a guard, and he wondered whether the one for this circle was one he should be concerned about. Pausing for a moment, Crowley looked down at _Lonely Planet Europe_ to see what intel it had.

 _Oh, yes, thanks for the reminder_ , the book read. _I forgot to mention one of the most interesting parts of the sixth circle. It’s guarded by the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull of legend. Whatever you do, don’t pretend to be a matador and hold out a cape for the Minotaur to charge at. Also don’t make any jokes about bullshit, taking the bull by the horns, a bull market, the running of the bulls, et cetera. He’s heard them all a million times, and he didn’t find them funny even the first time around. Probably best to avoid jokes altogether. Also, you might want to RUN! As in NOW!_

“What?” Crowley muttered, and looked up. He immediately saw why the book was advising him to run and why it was good advice. The Minotaur had found him, and something had prompted the bull to charge even though Crowley was not waving a cape or otherwise taunting it. Despite its ungainly horns, which looked heavy enough to give the Minotaur a terrible backache from lugging them around all day on a bipedal body, the creature was surprisingly fast. Crowley didn’t have time to do anything but gape at the rapidly approaching horns and prepare to be impaled.

Just then, Dog leapt in front of him and snarled viciously. Even more vicious than the snarl itself was the jet of flames that shot out of his mouth. It was confirmation that Dog had picked up the neat trick of breathing hellfire. The Minotaur abruptly veered off its collision course to avoid the flames. Crowley assumed that, as a denizen of Hell, the Minotaur couldn’t be harmed by hellfire, but that didn’t mean it had to like it. It probably liked the look of Dog’s teeth even less. The Minotaur was no longer charging Crowley, but it kept charging nonetheless, no doubt because it’s embarrassing to break off mid-charge. So Crowley hightailed it down the steps to make his escape before the Minotaur decided to turn around and have another go at him.

“Good dog,” Crowley said, patting Dog’s head once they were what could be laughingly considered a safe distance away. He had heard that positive reinforcement was important for training animals. Not like the negative reinforcement he routinely used on plants.

Glancing back at _Lonely Planet Europe_ , Crowley saw that the book had plaintively spelled out, _What about me? I warned you._

“Yeah, and you took your sweet time about it,” Crowley told the book. “You just had to go through your full repertoire of bull jokes first. From now on, if there’s danger, I want you to tell me right away, all right? Just shout it out in all caps. Otherwise, I’m going to see test whether 451 degrees Fahrenheit really is the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.”

 _No problem_ , the book spelled out hurriedly, probably recognizing that there was no shortage of flames about with which Crowley could make good on his threat _. We are now approaching the seventh circle, where those guilty of the sin of violence are condemned. Behold, the murderers, war-makers, plunderers, tyrants, blasphemers, and usurers_. _Here is yet another of Hell’s scenic waterways, the Phlegethon, River of Flame_ † _, flowing across the Plain of Burning Sand. This is a really classic hellscape, the kind you see on the postcards!_

“And the guard for this circle?” Crowley asked the book impatiently. “Is it likely to charge and impale me?”

_Just some centaurs. They probably won’t bother you, they’re pretty busy._

_Lonely Planet Europe_ was correct that they were now in a classic hellscape. It was as hot as hell. Precisely as hot. Much of the heat came from the Phlegethon, whose waters were not water but blood. Boiling blood that was also somehow on fire, despite blood not being in general a highly inflammable substance. The murderers, war-makers, et al. were immersed in the boiling blood. _Lonely Planet Europe_ was also correct that the centaur guards were busy. There was a whole army of them, patrolling the banks of the Phlegethon. Every time one of the condemned souls tried to lift himself out of the river, a centaur shot flaming arrows at him to discourage that sort of initiative. Just to top things off, it was raining again. This time, it was a rain of hellfire. Each drop sizzled when it landed on the flesh of the damned.

Crowley tried not to look too closely at the condemned. These were the big bads of history, the purveyors of genocide and other crimes against humanity. He and Aziraphale had spent many a night trying to drink away the memory of the atrocities they had seen those individuals commit. If anyone deserved to be boiled in blood for eternity, it was that lot. Still, it was disturbing, to say the least, to hear their screams and to smell their burning flesh.

“How am I meant to get across that mess?” Crowley muttered to _Lonely Planet Europe_. There was no bridge or ferry across the Phlegethon as far as he could see.

_Easy, there’s a ford just a ways downstream._

“Ford?” Crowley repeated in disbelief. “As in you want me to wade across that?”

_A little hellfire never hurt anyone._

“I beg to differ.”

_Never hurt anyone other than non-demons, that is. And as luck would have it, you’re a demon. So no need to be squeamish._

Crowley was more squeamish about the blood and the souls that were swimming in it than about the hellfire, but he supposed the book had a point. Demons must ford the Phlegethon all the time. He followed the river, which flowed with a sound like a sucking chest wound, to where it shallowed out.

 _See? It’ll barely come up to your knees. Just – don’t drop me in, all right?_ The text looked a bit shaky. Despite its bravado, _Lonely Planet Europe_ was scared.

Crowley decided that he would cross as quickly as possible, to minimize the time he was in contact with the distasteful boiling blood and the even more distasteful souls that were wallowing in it. Tucking _Lonely Planet Europe_ into his jacket so that it would feel safe, Crowley got a tight grip on Dog’s leash. “All right,” he said to Dog. “Ready?”

Dog was always ready to splash around, whether in a just-filled bathtub or in a mud puddle on a Tadfield lane or in a burning river of the damned. Crowley plunged into the knee-deep froth of blood and flame and started dashing across, Dog splashing happily along beside him. Crowley could feel the heat from the hellfire flames, and it tickled in the way hellfire always did. Much more unpleasant was the way his expensive Italian leather shoes immediately filled with blood and squelched with each subsequent step. The tangy metallic scent of hot blood wafted up, and Crowley gagged and decided not to breathe again until he was on the other side. Suddenly, a hand shot out of the river and wrapped itself around Crowley’s ankle. With the forward momentum he had built up, it was all Crowley could do to maintain his balance and stop himself from face-planting in the river of blood.

“Don’t _do_ that,” he said furiously when he had finished windmilling his arms and felt that he had regained his balance. He turned to glare at the poor hapless soul that still had his ankle in its grip. “What’s wrong with you? Grabbing people by the ankle when they’re trying to pass by.”

The shade looked up, tears rolling down his bloody face. He wasn’t anyone Crowley recognized, but he must have done something pretty evil to make it into this circle. Probably just a common murderer. “Please,” the shade begged of Crowley. “I know now that what I did was wrong. I’ve repented. Please, have mercy.”

“You’re too late for repenting, and you’re in the wrong place for mercy.” Moodily, Crowley kicked to try to free his ankle from the clingy spirit’s grip, but the bloke was really hanging on. “Listen,” Crowley said, dropping his voice low. “I dislike the arrangement Down Here just as much as you do. Well, probably not quite as viscerally as you do, but I do dislike it. And I’m on my way to do something about it, but I have a problem, which is that you won’t let me across this bloody flaming river. So do us both a favor and get a grip, but on something other than my ankle.”

“You’re really going to do something about it?” the shade asked, looking as though he had just stumbled across some long-abandoned hope. Dog licked his face reassuringly.

“Yes, if you just let _go_. And don’t go spreading it around.”

“Thank you,” the shade said, and let go. He sank back into the flames, and Crowley tugged on Dog’s leash and finished dashing the remaining distance across the Phlegethon.

Arriving at the far side, Crowley paused for a moment beside a towering deposit of brimstone to inventory the sad state of his shoes and clothing. His trousers were soaked through with blood all the way up to the knees, and his shoes were filled with it. Because it was not earthly blood but rather of infernal origin, it could not be removed with a miraculous dry-cleaning, so he was stuck with it. He would have to endure the remainder of his journey with squelching shoes and sticky trousers, as if he weren’t in Hell already. Dog, also covered with the stuff, crouched in preparation for shaking it off, but Crowley shot him a death glare and warned, “Don’t even think about it.” The last thing Crowley needed was for Dog to spatter him with even more Phlegethon-blood. Crowley attempted to empty his shoes of blood, realized it was a losing battle, gave up, and continued down the stone steps.

 _See? That wasn’t so bad_ , chirped _Lonely Planet Europe_ when Crowley opened it again.

“Easy for you to say,” Crowley muttered. “What fresh hell‡ awaits us now?”

_Well, right after the great firefall, we’ll enter the eighth circle –”_

“Hang on. Firefall?”

_Oh, yes, it’s quite a sight to see. The great falls of the Phlegethon, which separate the seventh and eighth circles._

“Please tell me I don’t have to abseil off a firefall,” Crowley groaned.

_No, nothing as adventurous as that. There was talk of installing a zipline a few years ago, but they put the kibosh on that. So it’s just more stairs._

“Great, more stairs.” Crowley swore that, if he survived this ordeal, he would never go near a staircase again.

They arrived at the Great Firefall of the Phlegethon, and Crowley had to concede that it was impressive. Like Niagara Falls, if Niagara Falls were doused in petrol and had a match tossed into it. As _Lonely Planet Europe_ had promised, the stairs continued their endless march downward beside the falls, wending back and forth in a zigzag pattern to navigate the steep cliff.

 _The eighth circle,_ the guidebook read out as Crowley descended beside the falls, _is the circle of fraud._

“Wait. Fraud is worse than murder? What kind of a twisted moral system is this?” Crowley felt a painful longing for Aziraphale, who would no doubt be willing to have a spirited argument on the matter.

_I am but a humble guide. I don’t make judgments about the local customs. Anyway, here you’ll find panderers, seducers, flatterers, simoniacs, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves, counselors of fraud, sowers of discord, falsifiers, alchemists, imposters, counterfeiters, and perjurers._

It sounded like Crowley’s kind of people. “What are simoniacs?” he asked.

_Those who committed the sin of simony. The sale of ecclesiastical favors and offices._

“That’s a very specific sin.” Crowley supposed the bureaucrats had to keep busy somehow, and creating ever-more refined taxonomies of sin was as good a way as any. “What kind of monster guards this circle?”

_A dragon._

“Of course.” Crowley rolled his eyes. The way his day was going, he was not surprised that there would be a dragon in it.

_My professional recommendation is that you turn into a snake for this circle._

“Why?”

_You’ll blend right in. You’ll see._

“Fine.” Crowley thought serpentine thoughts and found himself in his snake form. He curled _Lonely Planet Europe_ in his tail, picked up Dog’s leash between his teeth, and slithered along down the steps like a slinky. He was aware of how ridiculous he looked, a snake walking a dog, but no one Down Here would be likely to give them a second look. They had more pressing things to worry about.

Crowley made his way along a narrow path, which dropped off into a series of ditches on either side. Down in the ditches, the condemned souls of the fraudsters howled as they were whipped by horned demons, gouged by clawed demons, hacked by sword-wielding demons, and otherwise tormented by demons. Crowley noticed that there were also quite a few snakes about. In the pit, they wound themselves around the condemned souls like angry ropes, occasionally sinking their fangs into someone’s jugular as if to see how it tasted. Crowley was a bit offended on behalf on his fellow serpents that they were seen as so horrid that their presence would make a suitable punishment for the damned, but on the other hand he was grateful that he had never been assigned to that duty and had been sent to Earth instead. In any case, _Lonely Planet Europe_ was once again correct. Crowley was blending right in here in the circle of fraud. No one, including the terrifying hellfire-breathing dragon flying lazily above like a surveillance drone, seemed to notice the odd duo of snake and hellhound picking their way among the evil ditches.

Just as Crowley had that thought, someone did notice him. The someone was one of the condemned souls, who had somehow wandered out of the ditches and onto the path directly in front of him. The shade was that of an old woman, with wild gray hair, wilder eyes, and an arse wildly sagging with age. Crowley would not normally have taken notice of the state of the woman’s arse, except that it was difficult to ignore. For one thing, the woman was naked, as all shades in Hell are. For another, unlike most shades in Hell, her head had been turned around 180 degrees so that, when she faced him, so did her arse. Crowley assumed that she had not had that particular bodily deformity while alive and that it was instead part of her punishment for whatever sin she had committed. He hoped that her sin had been so terrible that she deserved that kind of punishment, but it was hard to think of what sin would be terrible enough to merit spending eternity arse-backwards.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” the woman said to Crowley, in a voice that sounded as though it was always on the edge of cackling. She gestured a bit helplessly and asked, “Would you mind shifting back so we’re at eye level? It’s a bit hard for me to see you down there.”

Crowley saw the problem. The woman couldn’t easily turn her face down to look at him because her body bent the other way. Just looking at her try to make eye contact made his own back hurt, so he automatically shifted back to his human form. He shot a nervous glance upward, but the dragon was nowhere to be seen.

“That’s better, handsome,” the woman said, in a voice that could now be fairly described as a cackle. “What a treat for my old long-damned eyes.”

“Do I know you?” Crowley was bewildered. He was quite sure he had never seen the woman in life, although maybe it was the whole backwards-head thing that was throwing him for a loop. But at the same time, he felt that there was something familiar about her. “Did I perhaps tempt you at some point?”

“Oh, how I wish,” the woman said, letting out an especially delighted cackle. “You wouldn’t have had to work hard at all to tempt me to taste _your_ fruit.” She gave an exaggerated wink in case her innuendo was too subtle.

“Er,” Crowley said, not knowing what to add to that. Of all the things he had expected in Hell, being chatted up by the shade of an old woman with a backwards head was not one of them.

“I’m Agnes,” the woman said. “Agnes Nutter.”

“Oh. _Oh,_ of course.” Now it all made sense. The woman was true to her brand, just as much of a nutter as advertised.

“Sorry about this,” she said, waving at her monstrosity of a body. “This is what they do to all us fortune-tellers, diviners, astrologers, and prophets. They say that that we ‘usurp God’s prerogative by peering into the future,’ and that’s a direct quote. Since we were looking forward, they make us look backward, with nothing to stare at for eternity other than our own arses. It’s supposed to be poetic justice, but it seems rather prosaic to me. A bit on the nose, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Crowley agreed, “they tend to take things rather literally.” A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he blurted out, “So if you knew I was coming, does that mean you can still see the future? I mean, your original book only went up to the Apocalypse, and your idiot descendent burned the sequel you had sent to her –”

“Which I also saw coming, by the way,” Agnes said. “I wrote that one for my own entertainment, mostly. But yes, it covered everything since the first one, and what is yet come.”

“And?” Crowley prompted impatiently. “What is yet to come?”

“Not much. I can see the next twenty-seven minutes with perfect clarity, and after that, nothing.”

“Er, what happens in twenty-seven minutes?”

“I assume that’s when you accomplish your mission and send all Hell’s souls to oblivion. It seems that, although I was able to see events that transpired after my mortal death, the future beyond the extinction of my own soul is obscured to me.” As an afterthought, she added, “Either that, or the whole world ends in twenty-seven minutes. But let’s be optimistic and assume it’s the former.”

“So you don’t know whether this whole thing will work.” Crowley felt dejected.

“Well, it will work in that you will save all the souls Down Here from eternal torment. If you were to issue a referendum on the issue among the citizenry of Hell, I’m quite confident that it would be a landslide vote in favor of oblivion. I mean, look at us.” She gestured at her own horribly contorted body again.

“Yes, but …”

“But you don’t know if you’ll also succeed in liberating the souls from Heaven. All you really want to know is what will happen to you and your angel. Whether the two of you will be safe, and whether he’ll forgive you for what you’ve done.”

“Well, yes,” Crowley said casually, as if it were an issue of minor interest. “If you’ve seen anything along those lines, I wouldn’t mind knowing about it –”

“Sorry, handsome. Like I said, it’s a great dark veil after this. I wish it were otherwise, because I’d like to know what happens to you two. Because I’m a romantic at heart, I’m going to my oblivion assuming it will work out. I mean, I bet if I were to ask that telepathic book of yours, it would tell me that you haven’t been able to think of anything other than the angel the whole time you’ve been Down Here.”

Crowley reflexively glanced down at _Lonely Planet Europe_ , and it chimed in, _Confirmed. You’ve found something to remind you of Aziraphale on each and every one of the circles of Hell. It’s really rather sweet –_ Crowley slammed _Lonely Planet Europe_ shut, which is the closest thing one can do to punching a book in the face.

“And I may not be able to see much further into the future, but I can see the present, because that was the future not too long ago,” Agnes went on. “And in the present, your angel is – well, let’s just say he’s thinking about you too.”

“Thinking about me in what way?” Crowley asked uneasily. He could imagine Aziraphale still stewing at him back at the cottage. Still thinking that Crowley was selfish and didn’t care about him.

Agnes shook her head. “Never mind, I’ve already said too much. Now don’t be a pest about it,” she added as Crowley opened his mouth to argue. “Just, if you do see your angel again, and he’s willing to speak with you, tell him I said hello.”

“He would have liked to have met you,” Crowley said, feeling something like sadness that that meeting would never happen. “He’s a _fan_.”

“Well, in that case, let me at least sign a book for him. I wish we had a copy of _my_ book down here, but I suppose any old book will do.” She held out her hand for _Lonely Planet Europe_.

“What, _this_ book?” Crowley eyed it doubtfully. It didn’t seem like the sort of book that one should sign. The attention might go to its head, and it was insufferable enough as it was.

“Why not?” Agnes said. “After all, it was my descendent who enchanted it. Such a delightfully creative bit of magic, just as I would expect from a witch of my lineage.”

Crowley reluctantly handed _Lonely Planet Europe_ over to Agnes. She produced a pen from somewhere; Crowley didn’t want to speculate too deeply about from where. He watched as Agnes scrawled something on the title page of the book. Because of her ornate handwriting and archaic spelling, he couldn’t quite make out what she was writing. She signed her message with a flourish and handed the book back to Crowley.

“Now, you better run along,” Agnes said. “That dragon will be coming back this way in a moment. Just don’t turn into a snake right away, if you don’t mind. I want to watch you walk away.” She grinned lasciviously.

“Oblivion is too good for you,” Crowley muttered. But he honored her last request by remaining in human form while he continued down the stairs toward the ninth and final circle.

When he saw the tops of a series of towers peek out above the stairs below him, Crowley paused. He assumed those must be the entrance to the ninth circle, the rock-bottom of the pit, and he wanted to be prepared before he attempted to enter it. He opened up _Lonely Planet Europe_ again. Out of curiosity, he flipped to the title page to see what Agnes had written. But the page was blank.

“Hey, where’s the message that old nutter wrote?” he asked the book.

_That message isn’t for you, nosy. I’ll reveal it to its intended recipient and no one else. Anyway, you have other things to think about now. Just ahead is the ninth circle, the circle of –_

“Treachery, I know.” Crowley did remember that one. Just thinking of the concept of treachery made him feel irritable, because on some level he felt that he was betraying Aziraphale by going against the angel’s vehemently expressed wishes.

_Enough of that. I enjoy all forms of travel, except guilt trips. Now, what you see ahead are the giants who guard the Central Well at the base of the pit –”_

“Those are giants?” Crowley squinted at what he had taken to be towers. He could now see that one of the towers had shifted its position slightly.

_Yes, indeed. Giant giants. Six of them. Now, they’re none too bright and don’t really need to be, as there’s never been unauthorized access to the ninth circle. I mean, who would voluntarily come down here, right? So just walk casually past them and they probably won’t try to stop you._

“And what do I do when I’m Down There? You said this is where the soul escape hatch is. How do I find it?”

_It’s pretty obvious. You’ll know it when you see it. Just keep going Down, and you can’t go wrong. One more thing, though. I advise you to plan an exit strategy. Up until now, you’ve mostly been ignored because the infernal workforce in the pit is completely wrapped up in their own sadistic duties. But once the deed is done and the souls start leaking out, there will be alarms going off, guards snapping to attention, lots of scrambling as everyone tries to make it look like this was someone else’s fault, the usual things that accompany any industrial disaster. So you should make like a bat and get the hell out of here._

“Well, how can I do that? It’s a long way back up. Even if I were to fly, I’d never make it out of here before the dragon or the Furies or someone brings me down.”

_I recommend the lift._

Crowley paused, narrowing his eyes at the text on the page to make sure it said what he thought it did. It continued to say _the lift_. “You mean to tell me,” Crowley said through gritted teeth, “that there’s a lift down into the pit? And you neglected to mention this earlier because, what? You enjoyed making me descend eighteen thousand steps and dodge Minotaurs and randy old witches and wade through blood and trade away my sunglasses?”

 _Hold your horses._ The book’s text took on a frosty font, as if offended. _The lift was of no help to you in the Downward direction. It was recently installed following the merger, and it doesn’t stop on the Earth level. Instead, it directly connects the ninth circle of Hell to Heaven._

“So … after I release the souls here, I have an express route out of here to do the same thing Upstairs.”

_That’s right. Although you’re going to have a much harder time Up There, since you won’t exactly blend in –_

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

_More likely that bridge will collapse as soon as you step on it._

“Do you have anything else to say that’s actually helpful?”

_Just bundle up! In the ninth circle, it’s always a cold day in Hell. You’ll see the last of the infernal water bodies, the frozen lake Cocytus, in which the traitorous souls are trapped. It’s a veritable winter wonderland._

Crowley slipped the book back into his jacket, gave Dog’s leash another tug, and set off for the ninth and final circle. As he approached the giants, he could see that _Lonely Planet Europe_ had once again been correct about their lack of attention to guard duty. The problem with assigning guards to impregnable fortresses, like nuclear missile siloes or exclusive nightclubs, is that everyone knows that they are impregnable, the guards included. As a result, the guards don’t spend their shifts worrying about anyone trying to breach their defenses, as that’s impossible. Instead, they have to find other ways to fill the time. Usually, those other activities include drinking, games, and insults. The full trifecta was in play among the six giants. They were all taking great gulps from what appeared to be hazardous-waste containers, no doubt filled with hell-brewed hooch. They seemed to be in the middle of a raucous yet ill-defined card game, and each of the giants was accusing the others of cheating, probably with some justification. Crowley kept his head down as he went past the giants, and they showed no signs of having noticed him. They did, however, look like they might start throwing punches at each other, which would probably cause an earthquake, so Crowley hurried as quickly as he could down into the ninth circle proper.

Down Below was, of course, famous for its balmy climes, but the true heart of Hell was as cold as a broken oath. There was no way it could be otherwise, when it was so far from the light and heat of the sun, so distant from any human compassion or divine mercy. The carnal sins of lust and gluttony and greed and wrath burn hot, and even heresy and violence and fraud are found in warm hearts, but treachery is a cold steel blade.

The first blast of the ninth circle hit Crowley like the breath of some malignant ice-spirit. It was cold as the black void that separated the stars. It was cold without even a memory of warmth. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a visceral expression of evil. Crowley, who considered himself well-acclimated to evil through long exposure to both its infernal and human varieties and his own experience purveying low-grade forms of it, nevertheless shuddered when he crossed that wall of cold evil that marked the boundary of the ninth circle. He realized that he was a mere dilettante when it came to evil, and that real evil had been down here all this time laughing at him. Crowley did spare a moment to be thankful that at least Aziraphale wasn’t here to experience the feeling of this potent undiluted evil. He didn’t like the idea that the ninth circle even existed in the same world as Aziraphale, and his resolve hardened to accomplish his mission so that it no longer would.

The frigid wind picked up, and Crowley bent his head into it. The wind stung his eyes and made them tear up, but his tears froze on contact with the subzero air, leaving a curtain of frost along his lashes. The blood that had soaked into his trouser cuffs, which had been boiling only a short time ago, was now frozen solid too. Dog huffed out a breath of hellfire, and Crowley held his hands next to the flame as if it were a campfire. Shuffling forward, he made achingly slow progress against the wind.

It wasn’t much consolation, but there were others around who were having even less fun than Crowley was. Through his streaming eyes, he could make out shapes writhing in agony on one side of the path. They were the treacherous souls frozen into Lake Cocytus, unable to escape the cold cage they had built for themselves with their sins. The path Crowley was walking threaded a narrow path between the frozen lake and the narrow shelf-like cliff face that marked the edge of the ninth circle. Giant sharp icicles hung down from the cliff overhang like the fangs of a monster.

Finally, Crowley could see that he was approaching the very center of the pit, where there was no more Down to go. He could see a massive shape frozen into the ice. He was pretty sure he knew what that shape was, and he didn’t want to look at it too closely, so he averted his eyes. In the act of averting, his eyes fell on something altogether much more appealing to look at. If he had been asked to guess what a soul escape hatch looked like, Crowley would have been at a loss, but now he was confident that a soul escape hatch looked like _that thing_. The thing was just a few hundred feet ahead, right on the shore of the frozen lake. It was like an old-fashioned well, a cylinder a couple feet in diameter that extended a couple feet above the ground. It was sealed off with a heavy-looking lid, which was attached to a giant lever. Next to the lever was a sign that read _DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER_. The sign, more than anything, made Crowley confident that he had found the right thing. Any lever that someone had bothered to post a sign on to warn people not to pull it was most definitely a lever that should be pulled.

Even better, just a few hundred feet further along the frozen lakeshore was the lift. It was a fancy glass one, like the kind they put in expensive hotels. Crowley let his eyes trace upward along the shaft, which faded out far overhead like the vanishing point in a painting. It seemed incredible to believe that he had made it this far, but he had found his objective and his escape route. He hurried as fast as he could against the freezing wind so that he could make it to the soul escape hatch before anyone stopped him.

When he was only about ten feet away, something did stop him. It was the shape frozen into the lake, at the very center, right at the bottom of the pit, the lowest of the low. The shape he had been trying to ignore on the weak hope that it would ignore him too. Instead, the shape shifted lazily and said in a voice that boomed like an avalanche, “Crooowley.”

Crowley froze, which wasn’t hard to do given the ambient temperatures, and turned to face the being that had just said his name. He was surprised that the being knew his name, because he hadn’t realized that he rated that sort of attention. It was like working in the mailroom of a Fortune 500 company and finding out that the CEO knew who you were. There was no way that was a good thing.

“Yes …” Crowley said, trying to think of what the appropriate title of address was and finally settling on, “Boss. You, er, know who I am?”

“You were there that day. You were the one with the tire iron.” The voice sounded amused.

Crowley was glad that he didn’t have a tire iron now, because even that would be too much like a real weapon. There was even less of a point in having a real weapon when you were face-to-face with Satan on his home turf. Crowley forced himself to look up at Satan’s face. That involved craning his neck back quite a ways, because Satan was as tall as a high-rise office building, even frozen waist-deep in the lake as he was. The Devil looked so much like all the popular depictions of him, it was almost comical. His skin was a burnished red, curved horns protruded from his head, and his black wings extended out behind him like sails from a masted ship. His eyes glittered like hot coals as he gazed down at Crowley.

“Well, I mean, yes, I was _there_ , of course …” Crowley scrambled to downplay his role.

“You turned my son against me.” Now the voice didn’t sound so amused.

Crowley took a deep breath. He had a feeling that Satan was used to everyone cowering in terror before him, and maybe he would respect someone who stood up to him. Or maybe he would twist off the head of someone who stood up to him. Either way, Crowley decided he was through with cowering in terror.

“Respectfully, Boss, I don’t think there’s anyone in Hell, Heaven, or Earth who could make your son do anything he doesn’t want to.” He didn’t add that Satan had made a pretty poor excuse for a father, as that seemed like a low blow, and if it came to exchanging blows Satan would have a definite advantage.

There was a moment’s pause as Satan stared impassively, then he grinned. It was a terrifying sight. “You’re right,” Satan said. “He is a rebellious little rascal. Suppose the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, eh?” Satan laughed. The reverberations caused the icicles that had formed on the nearby rock overhangs to break off and plummet down like guillotines. “I see he still has that dog I sent him for his birthday,” Satan added, nodding at Dog.

“Yes, I’m just taking him for a walk,” Crowley said. “Your son is very fond of this dog, by the way.” He shifted so that Dog was between himself and Satan. He wasn’t too proud to use Dog as a canine shield if Satan decided he was in the mood to do some head-twisting after all.

“Of course,” Satan said. “He comes from the finest hellhound breeding stock.” Dog licked the ground, his tongue instantly freezing in place. He choked out a desperate little puff of hellfire to melt himself free.

“Anyway,” Satan said, apparently desiring to ignore Dog’s antics as they reflected poorly on the quality of Hell’s hellhound breeding stock, “after that whole incident, I read your personnel file. You’re quite a troublemaker. Disobedient, disloyal, and disrespectful of authority. You could have risen high in the ranks if you hadn’t gone rogue.”

“Er, thanks,” Crowley said uneasily, not sure if that was intended as a compliment or if he wanted to receive it as one.

“Of course, I’m not opposed to going rogue, in principle,” Satan went on. “I sort of invented the concept. God told us to serve humanity, and I said hang on, that’s not what I signed up for. I pledged to serve _Her_. _She_ was the one we all loved. Then she takes some mud and molds it into stupid earth-bound creatures and we’re supposed to bend over backwards to serve them? We, who were made from Her light and love? And, well, you know what happened from there.”

“Right,” said Crowley, who had not been paying much attention to the politics at the time and had only fallen in with the wrong crowd because they had an air of dangerous defiance about them and dangerous defiance was an appealingly novel concept back then.

“But I suppose you found something worthwhile in the humans,” Satan ruminated. “You did spend an awfully long time with them. Tell me, what is it you like about them? Never did see the appeal myself.”

“Well,” Crowley said. He resisted the urge to glance at his phone to see what time it was. Although he was pleasantly surprised that he had survived an encounter with the Devil for as long as he had, he hoped that said encounter would not go on too much longer. He gazed longingly at the tempting lever, just begging to be pulled, but he figured that the safest strategy was to humor Satan and try to answer his question. Besides, Crowley comforted himself with the knowledge that it must be getting very close to the end of Agnes’s allotted twenty-seven minutes and that this tiresome conversation therefore had a firmly scheduled end, one way or another.

“Humans,” Crowley said, trying to get his mind back on track. “Well, the thing about humans is that they’re always changing. Individuals change throughout their lives, and civilizations rise and fall, and ridiculous new fashion trends and dance crazes come and go every few years. And over time, humanity itself learns more and creates more and becomes, well, better.”

“Hmm,” Satan said thoughtfully. He idly drummed his fingers on the surface on the frozen lake, and the impact caused spiderwebs of fissures to crackle through the ice. “I can see how change would be appealing, at least. Nothing ever changes Down Here. I’ve been here since the Fall. This place was made as a prison for me and all you poor suckers who followed me. Then after you gave the humans that apple, they figured out the whole good and evil thing, and we had to start taking in the wicked ones down here. I guess She had the last laugh. I ended up having to serve humanity after all.”

“You … serve them?” Crowley asked dubiously. In his experience, the only way Hell served humans was with their heads on platters.

“Of course. This merger is just making official what’s been unofficial all along. Us and Upstairs, we’re part of the same system. Carrot,” Satan said, pointing upward, then, pointing downward, “Stick. I couldn’t even be left to my punishment in peace. We had to create a whole business model, with the tempting and the soul contracts in the field operations division, and the tormenting of the condemned down here in the pit. Ever since, it’s been all about the bloody humans, all the time.”

“But if you don’t like it, why didn’t you change the way Hell was run? I mean, you’re the Boss.”

“Eh, I’m really just a ceremonial figurehead. I mean, look at me, it’s not like I can leave my office here.” Satan gestured at the lower half of his body, frozen into the lake. “It’s those middle managers up on the administrative level that run the day-to-day operations. They send me some of the more egregious traitors to personally torture now and then, but otherwise my role is mostly to sign off on paperwork. That’s why I was so excited when it looked like the Apocalypse was finally happening. That was when I was finally able to break free and go poke my head up at the surface and have a look around. I was looking forward to making those human lives’ really miserable, after all they’ve put me through over the years. But when you foiled that, I had to come back down here to the salt mines. Just more human souls coming in, and more paperwork, without even an Apocalypse to break up the work week.”

Crowley found himself feeling, if not exactly sympathy for the Devil, at least some level of understanding for the Devil. “Well,” Crowley said, slipping into his old tempting routine even though that seemed inadvisable to try on Satan, “if you want those human souls to stop cluttering up the place, I have a proposal you might be interested in.”

“You mean that lever there?” Satan asked. “I assume that’s what you’re here for.”

“Well, yes. I mean, I have my own personal reasons for wanting a separation of Hell and Earth, and you wouldn’t have to serve humanity or even be around them anymore. It’s a win-win, right?”

Satan shrugged. “You’ll get no argument for me. It’s a creative solution. Beelzebub and those other bean-counters will never see it coming. They’re so comfortable with the status quo, they can’t imagine it ever changing. They’ve probably forgotten that lever is there. I might have done the deed myself, but I can’t reach.” He held out his massive arm to show that the lever was just out of the reach of his fingertips.

“Er, all right then,” Crowley said, wondering if Satan’s unexpected agreement was some sort of trick. Or, alternatively, if Satan really did think releasing the souls was a good idea, in which case Crowley had to give at least some consideration to the possibility that it was a bad idea.

“Mind you, there’ll be hell to pay once you do it,” Satan said casually. “They’ll probably build a tenth circle just for you. You’ll be the new me. There’s some symmetry in that. I betrayed Heaven for my love of God, and you’re betraying Hell for love too.”

“Why is everyone so obsessed with my relationship with Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, annoyed.

Satan raised an eyebrow. “I was talking about your love for humanity, but hey, whatever floats your boat.”

“Right,” Crowley muttered, embarrassed. “Humanity.”

“Aziraphale,” Satan repeated thoughtfully. “That’s the angel you were with that day, right? You know, your personnel file is filled with notes speculating on the nature of your relationship.”

Crowley decided that he had had enough. He realized that he had been stalling, afraid of what would happen to him once he released the souls. But, whatever happened, it would be infinitely preferable to having a heart-to-heart with Satan about Aziraphale. “I’m going to pull that lever now,” Crowley said abruptly. “That all right with you, Boss?”

Satan shrugged. “Don’t hold back on my account. Hey, I know, I’ll send those souls off with some music.”

He reached behind him and produced a violin. Earlier, when he had been complaining about his tragic fate of being frozen into a lake and only getting to torture an occasional human, one might have felt the urge to mockingly pretend to play him a song on the world’s tiniest violin. The violin he had picked up, however, was on the opposite end of the violin size spectrum. It may have been the world’s biggest violin. It was the size of a city bus, and the bow he applied to its strings was as long as a telephone pole.

The song Satan played was not by any human composer. It was, in every sense of the word, unearthly. It was a melody of falling and falling apart. This music was not meant for human ears. It was music that could only come from the mind and hands of a being who had spent a very long time alone in the dark and cold. Yet it was also a catchy tune. Almost danceable.

Crowley mentally revised his opinion of Satan from _hands-off boss, evil incarnate_ to _surprisingly reasonable bloke, talented amateur musician_. Then, the satanic song swirling around him like the background music to a dramatic film climax, Crowley crossed the short remaining distance to the lever and placed his hands on it.

Hesitating just a moment more, Crowley tried to conceive of the 50 billion or so souls he was about to send down the drain to who knew where. He couldn’t conceive of a number like that, of course, so he instead thought of the Hitlers and Stalins he was about to wipe out of existence, and that made him feel better. But then he thought of the Uncommitted and the virtuous pagans and the unbaptized and the doomed lovers and the hapless murderer who had grabbed at him in desperation and old Agnes Nutter patiently awaiting the destruction of her own soul, and that made him feel worse. No matter how miserable their existence in Hell was, non-existence was something you definitely couldn’t come back from. In that moment, the weight of what he was about to do crashed down on Crowley like an overloaded bookcase. He understood now why Aziraphale had balked at the idea. _Who are we to decide the ultimate fate of human souls?_ said the angel’s voice in his head.

 _Who am I?_ Crowley thought in response. _I’m the Serpent in the Garden_. He was the one who had gotten humanity banished to the wilderness, made them ashamed of their nakedness, sentenced them to hard labor and birth pains. He had made their lives miserable, and now he was about to make sure those miserable lives were all they had.

Maybe what he was doing was Wrong. Aziraphale thought so, and Crowley trusted the angel’s expertise on things like that. But Crowley also knew that if he didn’t open the hatch, sooner or later Above and Below would destroy them both. And Crowley had seen Aziraphale be nearly destroyed too many times. If it was something he had the power to prevent, that was a power he would use. If releasing the souls was Wrong, Crowley didn’t want to be right.

So when he finally pulled the lever, he wasn’t thinking about the 50 billion. There was only one person he was thinking of.

He put quite a bit of force into pulling down the lever, given how massive and heavy the whole contraption looked, but it moved easier than he expected, resulting in him almost falling over like a player on a tug-of-war team when the opposing team decides to let go of the rope. The aftermath came immediately. It was a quite literal rendition of all hell breaking loose. Like a river breaching a levee, souls rushed in to fill the void or whatever it was the escape hatch drained to. Crowley could see that this was what was happening, because the souls were visible. They didn’t look like the shades they had been housed in, but instead looked almost exactly like glowworms, tiny pinpricks of light. There were so many of them streaming in to drain out of the escape hatch, from all directions, that they resembled a multi-threaded river of golden light. The streams of light appeared to undulate with the rhythms of the otherworldly song Satan was still banging out on the violin. It was pretty.

But, as _Lonely Planet Europe_ had predicted, Hell’s workforce had gone into full-on panic mode. Alarms blared like air-raid sirens, and from the higher circles, Crowley could hear shouting over the violin refrains. He couldn’t make out exactly what was being shouted, but it conveyed the general impression of _What the hell just happened and whose fault was it?_ It was indeed time to make like a bat.

Crowley sprinted the remaining distance to the lift, almost slipping on the ice in the process, Dog trotting alongside. Crowley hit the Up button, then hit it a few more times in quick succession just to make sure the lift had gotten the message that its services had been requested. He spent perhaps thirty seconds dancing in place in agonized terror, then the doors to the lift slid open with a cheery ding. Crowley and Dog threw themselves inside, and the doors slid lazily shut. There were only two buttons inside the lift. One was labeled simply with a Down arrow, the other with an Up arrow. Crowley hit the Up arrow, and the lift took off like a rocket.

It did seem to be a high-speed lift. Through the glass walls, Crowley watched as the ninth circle rapidly shrank beneath him, then the eighth, then the seventh, golden streams of souls flowing downward from each level like champagne overflowing from a tower of stacked glasses. He wished the lift would slow down just a bit to give him a moment to plan his next move. He had been deliberately focusing all his mental energy on releasing the souls from Hell and hadn’t even started thinking about how to infiltrate Heaven. That would have been a waste of valuable mental energy, as he hadn’t expected to survive his journey into Hell. Now that he had, it seemed that no amount of mental energy would be enough to allow him to think of a way to get him into Heaven undetected. Heaven was a gated community, with guards and cameras and motion sensors to keep out riffraff like him.

As he watched the sixth, fifth, and fourth circle rapidly vanish beneath him in turn, Crowley realized there was no way he was going to get this done without Aziraphale. Ideally, he would have gone into Hell while Aziraphale came up with some excuse to access Heaven, then the two of them could have opened their respective escape hatches at the same time before making their own escape and meeting up on Earth for a nice dinner and some wine. As it was, Hell had no doubt notified their angelic allies about the breaching of their soul security system, and now Heaven would know what Crowley was planning and would lock down their own escape hatch. Crowley would never be able to get to it, even if he could somehow sneak into Heaven, which he couldn’t.

The third, second, and first circles flashed by in their turn, filling up the pit with their greater volumes of glowing souls making their way down the drain. It was looking like this was going to be the last lift ride of Crowley’s life, so he decided to just enjoy the view. It was quite an impressive view. The lift temporarily lurched into darkness as it left Hell and crossed some geological strata, like a train going through a tunnel. Then it emerged into bright sunshine, the Earth spread out below in all its blue and green glory. Crowley peered down to try to identify the land features, curious about where an infernal/heavenly lift could have been installed without the humans noticing. Of course, it must have been magically hidden from human view just like all the escalators to Heaven and Hell. He didn’t see anything he specifically recognized on the surface, just the familiar shapes and colors of trees, rivers, lakes, mountains, fields, cities. All the things that God and humanity had made, that Crowley and Aziraphale had spent millennia exploring and experiencing and enjoying together.

“Goodbye, Earth,” Crowley muttered. “It’s been nice knowing you.” He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he blinked them away impatiently. Then the lift plunged into clouds, and he couldn’t see the Earth anymore.

Ice frosted the glass of the elevator, and Crowley prepared himself for what was coming. He tried to cultivate some hope that he would be able to think on his feet and come up with a brilliant plan once he arrived in Heaven. He was always a better schemer under pressure. But the hope wilted under the harsh light of reality, and he impatiently stomped it into the ground. He knew well that, if you couldn’t come up with a good plan, you were better off with no plan at all. Instead, he consoled himself with the thought that at least he had tried. And, hey, he had freed 50 billion or so souls from Hell. That was no small feat. He wondered what the ramifications would be. Even though he hadn’t succeeded in separating Earth from Above and Below, Hell’s resources, at least, would be severely depleted by the loss of so much power. Maybe Above and Below would be so busy dealing with the aftermath that they would leave humanity alone, and more importantly, leave Aziraphale alone. Maybe Crowley had at least saved Aziraphale, in which case it had been more than worth it. And maybe he had helped out humanity too. Maybe now, all the humans would go to Heaven after they died. He wasn’t sure that was how it worked, as he hadn’t asked Death what would happen if only one of the escape hatches was opened. But if he had checked all the human souls through to Heaven as their final destination, maybe he had done something that Aziraphale would agree was Good. Maybe Aziraphale would even think fondly of him after he was gone.

With that thought, so comforting that Crowley hardly even dared allow himself to think it, the lift emerged above the clouds. Bright light streamed in through the glass, but it wasn’t sunshine. It was the light of Heaven, irritatingly bright like overhead fluorescent lights in an office. Heavenly light always gave Crowley a bit of a headache.

All too soon, the lift stopped, and the doors slid unceremoniously open with another cheerful ding. Crowley didn’t have time to prepare himself to react, so he would just have to react. The way he reacted to what he saw on the other side of the lift doors was to gape in shock and horror.

The doors had opened in one of the million lobbies that broke up Heaven’s endless maze of corridors. Standing directly in front of the doors was a group of four angels who had clearly been waiting for Crowley. One was the archangel Gabriel, wearing the smirk that always triggered in Crowley a Pavlovian desire to punch something. Two were anonymous warrior angels, who were expertly engaging in the impassive stare of law enforcement. Finding that Heaven had sent two bruisers and one upper-level manager to apprehend him at the entrance was not surprising. Crowley would have been surprised if they had done otherwise. What was causing him to gape in shock and horror was the identity of the fourth angel, the one who had his eyes cast down at the marble floor of Heaven’s lobby as if were some particularly interesting book he couldn’t tear himself away from. Because that angel, of course, was Aziraphale.

* * *

*The guard also wondered if maybe Crowley, wearing his dark sunglasses inside, was blind. But then the guard realized that, if so, the man had the least-qualified guide dog in the world. A pot of petunias would be a better guide dog than Dog, because at least a pot of petunias wouldn’t lead you into a glass storefront, which Dog was trying to do to Crowley.

**More accurately, Los Angeles is the new Hell. That sound you hear is twelve million residents of greater LA nodding in agreement.

***These weren’t actually _their_ bodies, as their real bodies were left behind, decomposing on Earth. However, every soul in Hell had a sort of incorporation, known as a shade, that looked like their body and definitely felt like a body. There would be no point in all the pain and suffering if there weren’t a body to experience it. As for the nature of that pain and suffering, it was curated by the demons who worked in Customer Relations, specialists who took pride in designing exquisite and artistic torture experiences. Their goal for every project was to create a contrapasso, or an instance of poetic justice. For example, for the Uncommitted, the banner represents their pursuit of self-interest. If you want to annoy a Customer Relations demon, which is inadvisable, repeat the old cliché about _There’s a special place in Hell for so-and-so_. This offends the Customer Relations demons’ professional pride, as they work hard to ensure that there’s a special place in Hell for _everyone_.

†Not to be confused with the other River of Flame, the one in Cleveland.

‡Contrary to popular belief, fresh hell is not as bad as the alternative, which is hell that has been left out too long and has started to go off a bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's not obvious, pretty much everything in this depiction of Hell is based on Dante's Inferno.


	12. Chapter 12

After he had finished gaping in shock and horror at Aziraphale’s unexpected presence in Heaven, Crowley’s next reaction was to grab Dog by the collar and shout, “Down, boy!” This was a task he accomplished with some urgency, because Dog had opened his terrifying maw with one of his volcanic growls, which Crowley had learned to identify as a clear precursor of an eruption of hellfire. While, in principle, Crowley approved of Dog’s instinct to spit hellfire at angels, the clear and emphatic exception was when one of said angels was _his_ angel.

Dog whimpered but obediently kept his hellfire in check. Immediately, one of the burly warrior angels snapped a collar on top of the blue nylon one Dog was already wearing.* This collar was made of silver and had sigils inscribed in it, presumably for hellhound-disempowerment purposes. It also had a pet cone attached to it, presumably for hellhound-humiliation purposes. As soon as the collar was snapped into place, Dog shrank back to his former size, the collar shrinking with him. He stared up pathetically, eyes sad, tongue lolling out, tail drooping, ears flopping. He whimpered again and tried to lick his paw but was impeded by the pet cone. There was not a trace of Hell left in Dog. The warrior angel locked the collar with a long silver key, which he then put in his robe pocket with a look of satisfaction.

The other warrior angel, meanwhile, snapped a set of handcuffs onto Crowley. The handcuffs looked similar to Dog’s collar, in that they were silver and inscribed with sigils. When they locked into place, Crowley could feel his demonic powers lapse into dormancy. It was a disconcertingly helpless feeling, like watching a valet drive off with your car. He spared a moment to be grateful that at least they hadn’t put a pet cone on him.

“Well, Aziraphale,” Gabriel said in that infuriating drawl of his. “I have to say, I was skeptical when you first came to us, but I’m pleasantly surprised that your information was good. The demon entered Heaven right where you said he would, and he has a hellhound with him, just like you said he would. This lovers’ quarrel of yours must have really been something for you to throw him under the proverbial bus** like that. Anyway, I’m glad our prodigal angel has returned. Keep up this level of cooperation, and you may eventually be able to earn your way back into Heaven’s good graces. After all, we are nothing if not merciful.” He smiled, and Crowley wished he had his hands free, because his knuckles were itching to have Gabriel’s teeth embedded in them.

Eyes still fixed on the floor, Aziraphale said in a low voice, “It would be my greatest honor to serve Heaven again.”

Crowley had to suppress a disbelieving snort at that, and he tried to catch Aziraphale’s eye to warn him not to lay on the ingratiation too thick, as even Gabriel’s inflated ego could only take so much puffing up. But Aziraphale continued to refuse to let his eye be caught. That bothered Crowley. He didn’t know exactly what was going on here, but he could only assume that Aziraphale was working some sort of scam to gain Heaven’s trust enough that he could do something to get him and Crowley out of their current predicament. That was a nice gesture, but Aziraphale was not qualified to work scams unsupervised, and anyway they wouldn’t be in this predicament if he had just gone along with the whole soul-release idea in the first place and let Crowley handle the scamming. They might be in another predicament altogether, but not this one. And this was an especially frustrating predicament to be in, because in the lift Crowley had just consoled himself by thinking about how, no matter what terrible fate awaited him in Heaven, Aziraphale was at least safe on Earth. The fact that Aziraphale was not safe on Earth and was also not working with him in any pre-coordinated way was the worst of both worlds. It meant that the mission was almost certain to fail, and also that Crowley wouldn’t be the only one to suffer the consequences. It led to the depressing conclusion that this had all been for nothing.

Nevertheless, now that they were firmly ensconced in their current predicament, Crowley was willing to back Aziraphale’s play. The problem was that he had no idea what that play was. Maybe Aziraphale had no idea either. Either way, it would be helpful to know, but Crowley wasn’t getting even a hint of what was going on, because Aziraphale wouldn’t look at him.

A doubt crept into Crowley’s mind. He couldn’t think of many reasons why Aziraphale would be so pointedly avoiding eye contact. One reason he could think of was that Aziraphale was feeling guilty. That is, maybe he was feeling guilty because his cooperation with Heaven was not a scam, but was genuine. Not that Crowley believed for a second that Aziraphale was telling the truth about his greatest honor being to serve Heaven again. But Aziraphale had always seen his greatest honor as serving humanity. If he really believed that Crowley’s plan to destroy the souls in Heaven was Wrong, then maybe he had chosen humanity over Crowley. That was the sort of thing that Aziraphale would at least feel guilty about, hence his refusal to meet Crowley’s eye.

As soon as the thought occurred to him, Crowley decided it was ridiculous. He knew Aziraphale, after all. Better than he knew himself. Crowley often surprised himself with his own actions, but he always knew what Aziraphale would do. Well, nearly always. There were exceptions, as their most recent row had demonstrated that Crowley had not anticipated Aziraphale’s level of dedication to the immortality of human souls. But, more accurately, Crowley was confident that he knew what Aziraphale would _not_ do. And turning Crowley over to Heaven was near the top of the list of things that Aziraphale would not do. Not when Aziraphale knew full well that the only thing that awaited Crowley in Heaven was a bathtub of holy water. No matter how angry Aziraphale was, he wouldn’t betray Crowley. He wouldn’t have done it even in the early days of their acquaintance when they were nothing more than adversaries and occasional drinking buddies. He certainly wouldn’t have done it once the Arrangement was officially-unofficially in place and they were officially-unofficially friends. And he absolutely wouldn’t do it now, not after everything they had gone through together and everything they had become to each other. Crowley felt a rock-solid certainty in that fact.

But then why wouldn’t Aziraphale look at him? The doubt persisted, no matter how much Crowley tried to push it away. He would certainly deserve to be betrayed, after all. He had betrayed Aziraphale first. And according to any crude moral calculus, if Aziraphale thought that saving Crowley was good but also thought that saving fifty billion human souls was good, it didn’t take a calculator to solve that equation. But Aziraphale didn’t believe in utilitarian trade-offs like that. He was a much, much better person than Crowley was. That was the fundamental problem in their relationship.

Crowley’s ruminations were cut off by another chirpy ding from the lift doors. They slid open to reveal a most unwelcome addition to the party. It was Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, high-ranking infernal official, and Crowley’s least favorite former boss. Beelzebub, who usually projected the air of casual malice that Hell teaches in its management seminars, was now projecting the air of someone who was all too accustomed to enjoying the perks of leadership while not at all accustomed to having to earn them by actually demonstrating leadership. Beelzebub was wearing a visitor ID badge on a lanyard around their neck. Their compound eyes immediately fixed on Crowley.

“Crooowley,” Beelzebub buzzed menacingly. “I thought I’d find you here. With all the chaozzz and dezzztruction Downzzztairzzz, I thought, Crowley muzzzt be involved zzzomehow.”

“What chaos and destruction Downstairs?” Gabriel asked blankly.

“Don’t you check your mezzzagezzz? It’zzz all over Zzzlack.”***

“Um,” Gabriel said. He pulled out his mobile phone and went to check his messages. “Sorry, we’ve been a bit busy Up Here, and I had notifications turned off because the infernal thing was buzzing every ten seconds, no offense –”

“The demon Crowley hazzz releazzzed all the zzzoulzzz from Hell,” Beelzebub interrupted.

“How?” Gabriel looked bewildered.

“The ezzzcape hatch thing.” At Gabriel’s blank look, Beelzebub clarified, “You know, the giant lever.”

“That thing Death put in ages ago? I forgot that was there.” Gabriel turned to Aziraphale with a glare. “All you said was that your demon boyfriend was going to set a hellhound loose in Heaven. You didn’t mention that he was planning to stage a mass prison break for the human souls while he was at it.”

“I didn’t know,” Aziraphale said, doing a passable job looking surprised. “I mean, if he had told me he was planning to release souls from an escape hatch, I would have just laughed and said, there’s no way they would be stupid enough to leave a soul escape hatch lying around with a lever anyone could come along and pull.”

There was a pained silence, during which Crowley felt a sense of relief. He had been right. Aziraphale was on his side, as always. Crowley felt ashamed for his momentary doubt. Aziraphale might still be angry, but not enough that he wanted to see Crowley dissolved away into a puddle of goo by holy water. So the angel was working some kind of angle here, but he was still stubbornly looking anywhere but at Crowley, which meant that Crowley was still flying blind when it came to reacting to whatever move Aziraphale was planning to make.

“Wait,” Beelzebub said slowly. “Thizzz angel izzz working for you again? That’zzz Crowley’zzz angel.”

“Not anymore, they broke up or whatever.” Gabriel shrugged.

“Trouble in paradizzze,” Beelzebub said, looking amused. “Hell hath no fury like an angel zzzcorned.”

“How many cliches can you pack into a single utterance?” Crowley demanded, finally breaking his silence to speak up on behalf of the English language.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve taken thizzz traitor into cuzzztody,” Beelzebub said to Gabriel, jerking their head at Crowley. “Now we muzzzt act quickly. Normally I would advocate taking him Downstairzzz and beta-tezzzting zzzome of our more innovative new torture methodzzz on him. But he’zzz zzzimply too dangerouzzz. Every minute that he’zzz allowed to live izzz one too many. We muzzzt dezzztroy him immediately.”

“Sounds fun,” Gabriel agreed. “And long overdue.”

One of the warrior angels put his hand on the scabbard he wore at his side. “You want I should run him through, Boss?” he eagerly asked Gabriel. Clearly, the prospect of running someone through brightened any warrior angel’s day.

“No, you idiot,” Beelzebub snapped. “If you zzztab him, you’ll juzzzt dizzzincorporate him and he’ll end up in Hell, and we have quite enough going on Down There right now. We need a more permanent zzzolution.” He turned to Gabriel. “Where do you keep your holy water?”

“We’ve got a fountain of it a ways down the hall,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward one of the side corridors that branched off from the lobby where they stood.

“Well, let’zzz go then.”

One of the warrior angels jerked on Dog’s leash to make him trot along, whimpering. Behind them, Crowley’s designated warrior angel guard took a firm grip on his arm and propelled him along. Crowley felt like whimpering himself. He wanted Aziraphale to look at him so that Crowley could not-so-subtly hint that, if the angel was going to make a move to save him, they were rapidly running of moments in which such a move could be made. Even though Aziraphale had to realize that, it was worth emphasizing. But now Aziraphale fell into step beside the lead warrior angel, the one who had hold of Dog’s leash, so all Crowley could do was stare at the back of his head. Behind Crowley, Gabriel and Beelzebub were strolling along and talking shop.

“How many zzzoulzzz do you have Up Here, anyway?” Beelzebub asked Gabriel.

“Oh, it was over fifty billion last time I checked. You’d have to ask Inventory for the precise count.”

“Our zzztorezzz have been completely depleted. You’ll have to zzzend zzzome Down to uzzz.”

“These are virtuous souls,” Gabriel said indignantly. “We worked hard to get them.”

“Are we alliezzz or not? Besides, they can’t all be _that_ virtuouzzz. Just zzzend us zzzome of the more tarnished onezzz, we can get them the rezzzt of the way to damnation in no time.”

“That will be a matter for the board to decide,” Gabriel said with the lazy confidence of someone who had a board to make decisions for him. “We’ll have to schedule an emergency meeting for later today.”

Crowley tuned out the conversation, instead focusing on watching the back of Aziraphale’s head for any sign of what he was about to do. Crowley could feel a faint throbbing in his own head, resulting from a combination of the eye-stabbing heavenly light, the ear-stabbing heavenly background music†, and the sense of his impending demise.

They made their way through the seemingly endless corridors of Heaven. While Hell’s greatest extent was in the vertical direction, Heaven was a thin and vast expanse, hanging over the Earth like a particularly smug cloud. The corridors were mostly deserted. There were no human souls to be seen, and only an occasional angel hurrying along on some divine errand. The lack of crowds was a good thing, as it meant there would be fewer guards nearby to respond to whatever move Aziraphale was hopefully about to make, but it was also rather disconcerting. One thing that could be said in Hell’s favor was that it was a lively place. Or had been, until quite recently when Crowley had depopulated it. But Heaven already seemed empty and soulless. The contrast made sense, Crowley supposed. After all, Hell was other people. No one ever said that about Heaven. All the souls here were doubtlessly tucked away in their own private heavens. Misery loves company, which was why Hell had communal living arrangements, but it was probably hard to enjoy your eternal bliss if you could see that the grass was greener over on your neighbor’s side of the fence.

Another contrast was that more thought had been put into Heaven’s décor than Hell’s, but this was a case where more thought was not necessarily a good thing. Heaven’s walls were hung with paintings of various Biblical scenes, and every now and then there was an alcove recessed into the side of the corridor where a bust of some holy personage sat. The artworks had all been miracled into existence, and they were technically flawless, but at the same time they all looked like cheap mass-produced knock-offs you could buy on a street corner in Mumbai or Rio de Jeneiro. It was ironic, Crowley reflected, that the great cathedrals and temples that humans had built on Earth were much more successful in evoking a sense of the divine than Heaven itself was. Where Hell was all heat but no light, Heaven was all light but no heat.

Their little execution party reached a sort of suspension bridge where the corridor narrowed and crossed over a perpendicularly orientated corridor one level down. As soon as they started onto the bridge, Crowley saw that Aziraphale was finally starting to make his move. It was a strategic place for a move to be made, as the access points were limited to the narrow openings at each end of the bridge. Crowley also approved of the move itself, which was that Aziraphale had reached out his hand and appeared to be trying to sneak the key to Dog’s collar out of the robe pocket of the warrior angel. That was a simple, yet potentially effective, move. What Crowley did not approve of was how Aziraphale was executing said move. He wished that, at some point in the last six millennia, he had thought to give Aziraphale a crash course in the finer points of pickpocketing. Like all skills involving subterfuge and miscreance, pickpocketing came easily to Crowley, but came not at all to Aziraphale. To successfully pick someone’s pocket, it’s best to be dexterous and fast, but if you can’t manage the dexterous part, the fast part becomes all the more important. Aziraphale’s attempt lacked both dexterity and speed, his hand moving both clumsily and slowly toward the warrior angel’s pocket. Crowley supposed that the only saving grace was that Heaven’s uniform consisted of billowing robes, which are garments that are practically designed to have their pockets picked. If angels walked around Heaven in skinny jeans, this move of Aziraphale’s wouldn’t have had a prayer of working.

Still, if Crowley had seen what Aziraphale was up to, their escorts were sure to also see it any moment now, and then it would be game over. Crowley ascertained that he was going to have to make a move of his own. The only hand he had to play was to draw attention away from Aziraphale by being so obnoxious that everyone would be focused on him. Luckily, being obnoxious was also well within Crowley’s wheelhouse.

“How much further is it?” Crowley spoke up. “I mean, at this rate, I’m welcoming the prospect of a good holy water soak. Maybe you could put it in a hot tub for me. Do you know how many steps I had to descend to get to the ninth circle?” He started limping in an exaggerated way. “Neither do I, but I can feel every one of them in my hamstrings.”

Beelzebub and Gabriel pointedly ignored him, which was a good sign. It meant that he was getting on their nerves. Crowley’s warrior angel guard tugged on his arm insistently, but Crowley resisted the movement, slowing down and dragging his feet pathetically. Ahead, the warrior angel who had hold of Dog’s leash stopped and turned back to glare at him, and Crowley felt a surge of excitement that he had at least secured a stationary target for Aziraphale’s inept pickpocketing efforts.

“Have you perhaps considered putting in a bus system?” Crowley asked. The annoyed glares he was now receiving were like fuel for his creative energies, and he let his stream of consciousness flow like the Amazon River as he kept the corner of his eye on Aziraphale’s progress. “This place isn’t very accessible to the disabled, and that seems like the sort of thing you lot are supposed to care about. Or you could at least put in one of those moving walkways they have at airports. Or get a bunch of Segways for everyone. They tried those Down Below a few years ago, but it didn’t work very well because of all the stairs. But this place, this is prime Segway territory. You could all be zooming through these corridors as if this were a Silicon Valley start-up.” He saw that Aziraphale’s hand was now in the warrior angel’s pocket, amazingly still unnoticed by the others, and he ramped up for the grand finale. “Hey, I’ve got a brilliant idea. Why don’t you run and get the holy water and bring it back to destroy me right here? Least you could do is save me the walk. Anyway, all you need is a little drop to off me. A whole fountain of the stuff seems like overkill. Go on, I don’t mind waiting –”

“Zzztop zzztalling,” Beelzebub buzzed angrily.

“I’m not stalling,” Crowley said, watching out of the corner of his eye as Aziraphale finally withdrew the key from the warrior angel’s robe pocket. He waited until Aziraphale had fit the key into the lock on Dog’s silver collar before adding, “I’m distracting.”

There was a sudden click as Aziraphale released Dog’s collar, which fell to the floor along with the pet cone, and then an even more sudden growl as Dog grew back to his hellhound proportions, complete with hellhound eyes and teeth and breath. The warrior angel who had been holding his leash, realizing that he no longer wished to be holding that particular leash, dropped it from his suddenly nerveless fingers. Crowley’s own warrior angel guard, meanwhile, also seemed to experience some newfound difficulty with holding onto things. His hand dropped from Crowley’s arm.

Crowley didn’t waste a second, as seconds were a valuable resource in a situation like this. As soon as his guard released him, Crowley lunged at Aziraphale. Dog was clearly working up to a good explosion of hellfire, and he looked to be aiming it at the angel who had been holding his leash. The one Aziraphale was standing next to. As he collided with Aziraphale, Crowley instinctively tried to open his wings so that he could shield Aziraphale from the imminent hellfire conflagration. But his wings did not cooperate. Crowley could feel them, but it was as if they had been bound in steel. Cursing inwardly, Crowley realized it must be because his hands were still in the sigil-inscribed cuffs. Improvising, he did the next best thing and shoved Aziraphale away, as hard as he could. Not a moment too soon. Crowley felt the warm tickle of hellfire engulf him, just as Aziraphale stumbled safely out of the line of fire.

Crowley heard screams and turned to see that one of the warrior angels had taken the brunt of the hellfire and was currently burning away to cinders. Crowley quickly looked away, aware of how close Aziraphale had just come to meeting that same fate yet again. Dog growled again and turned his attention to the second warrior angel, who had the presence of mind to flee. Back at the other end of the bridge, Gabriel had also made a strategic withdrawal and was demonstrating his leadership by shouting in panic for reinforcements. That just left Beelzebub who, unfortunately, wasn’t bothered by hellfire. Before Crowley had a chance to do anything else, Beelzebub’s hand was wrapped around his throat.

“You betrayed uzzz yet again,” Beelzebub said, pushing Crowley back against the bridge railing. “You betrayed uzzz while we were on our way to dezzztroy you in punishment for the lazzzt time you betrayed uzzz.”

Crowley wanted to protest that he hadn’t really betrayed Hell, as betrayal presupposed some sort of loyalty that was then violated. He hadn’t really ever been loyal to Hell and had been even less so for the past few years, and Hell had never really trusted him either, as an environment of mutual trust was not the sort of workplace Hell wanted to foster. So there was no trust to violate and no loyalty to betray, ergo he was not a traitor. But he was prevented from making these logical points by Beelzebub’s hand crushing his vocal cords. Over Beelzebub’s shoulder, Crowley could see that Dog had turned his attention to Gabriel, stalking him like a hungry wolf while the archangel shouted for help and retreated further to remain out of hellfire-spitting distance.

“Lookzzz like a bit of a wait for the holy water,” Beelzebub went on. “Maybe I’ll dizzzincorporate you firzzzt after all. It will be more fun, anyway.” They pulled out a knife. It was a simple blade attached to a plain black handle. There was nothing decorative about the knife, nothing like the ornate designs Heaven put on the hilts and blades of their weapons. Hell was more practical about that kind of thing. A knife was meant to kill, not to look pretty.

“When you get down there,” Beelzebub said, pressing the knife against Crowley’s throat, “we’ll create a new zzzircle juzzzt for you. Even ten levelzzz down izzzn’t deep enough. We’ll zzzkip zzztraight to eleven–”

Suddenly, Beelzebub stopped talking. It wasn’t because they had run out of threats. They had just been working up a good head of steam on the threats and could have kept them going for quite a while longer. But the reason they stopped talking was a sound one. It was because their head was suddenly no longer attached to their body. Crowley blinked in surprise, because he had been sure that, of the two of them, he himself had been the one more likely to lose their head. As gravity caught up with Beelzebub’s headless body and slumped it to the floor, Crowley saw Aziraphale, looking very heroic and a bit flustered, standing behind it. He was wielding the sword that the now-incinerated warrior angel had threatened Crowley with. It hadn’t been incinerated along with the rest of the warrior angel, probably because metallurgy was the only branch of technology in which Heaven was quite advanced. The sword seemed to have gotten heated up by the hellfire, because Aziraphale was holding the sword’s hilt using the sleeve of his overcoat like an oven mitt. He had apparently retrieved the sword from the cinders of the warrior angel while Beelzebub and Crowley were distracted with threatening and being threatened, respectively.

“That was – impressive,” Crowley said, staring at Aziraphale. He never would have thought Aziraphale had it in him to do something as warriorlike as disincorporate the Lord of the Flies.

Apparently Aziraphale hadn’t thought he had it in him either, because he looked shocked at himself, the same way he did when he let a curse word slip. But all he said was, “Hold out your hands.”

Crowley automatically obeyed, and Aziraphale brought his newly acquired sword down on the chain that held the handcuffs together. Realizing that the surviving warrior angel had absconded with the key to the cuffs while making his escape, Crowley hoped that scissors would beat rock when blade met cuffs. He needn’t have worried. The cuffs splintered under the blow of the Heaven-forged blade, and Crowley tossed them aside. His hands were now free and, with them, he could feel his demonic powers slinking back. 

Aziraphale lowered the sword and, with his other hand, took Crowley’s wrists as if inspecting them for damage. Crowley looked up and his eyes finally met Aziraphale’s for the first time since they had entered Heaven. Aziraphale’s eyes were deep blue pools, brimming with regret and worry and affection, and Crowley had to swallow hard. He had been afraid that Aziraphale would never look at him like that again.

Beside them, a low buzzing that had been gradually building up in the background emerged into the foreground. It was coming from Beelzebub’s decapitated incorporation. Glancing over at it, Crowley was disgusted but not really surprised to see a swarm of thousands of flies emerge from Beelzebub’s robe. The old bastard had reverted to their true form. The swarm made a pass around Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s heads, and Crowley shooed them away, annoyed. He wished he had a fly swatter. Apparently having come to some sort of internal consensus about their direction of travel, the swarm made a beeline, or rather a flyline, back up the corridor toward the lobby with the lift.

“They’ll be heading Down Below and coming back Up with reinforcements,” Crowley said. “Come to think of it, your pal Gabe is probably scaring up some reinforcements of his own right about now, assuming Dog hasn’t scorched him out of existence yet.” Dog and Gabriel were now nowhere in sight, although the sounds of distant shouting suggested that Dog was continuing his rampage.

Aziraphale nodded seriously and said even more seriously, “We’d better get a wiggle on.”

At that, Crowley felt an overwhelming urge to hug Aziraphale. Luckily for his sense of demonhood, they didn’t really have time for that sort of thing. Instead, Aziraphale nudged him toward the far end of the bridge, and they took off running in that direction. The corridors weren’t wide enough to extend their wings for flying, probably by design. Like Hell, Heaven didn’t want to make it too easy for their employees to move about and potentially foment rebellions or organize unions. So running was the quickest way to get around, and run they did.

As they ran, Aziraphale kept his hand around Crowley’s wrist. Crowley could feel an idiotic grin break out on his own face. _This_ was how he had imagined their final standoff against Above and Below. Sure, they had very little hope of success or even or of survival, but standing together to face off against impossible odds had practically become a way of life for them. If it was all going to end, this was the way it should end.

As they ran, Aziraphale kept looking around wildly and occasionally stopping to peek his head into various side rooms along the corridor. He seemed to be searching for something. It gradually dawned on Crowley that he had been so overjoyed at having Aziraphale at his side again that he hadn’t bothered to check in on what it was they were doing. Maybe Aziraphale had come on board with the whole releasing of souls thing, since that ship had already sailed from Hell and now was their only chance to do the same in Heaven. Or maybe he was still set on leaving the souls to their eternal bliss in Heaven and just wanted to beat a hasty retreat back to Earth. They arrived at a junction, and Aziraphale paused, making small movements to the left, the right, straight ahead, and then back to the left, practically quivering with indecision about which way to go.

“Just out of curiosity,” Crowley said, “where is it we’re getting a wiggle on to?” It really was mere curiosity that made him ask. He was not going to try to convince Aziraphale to go along with the soul release. Whatever Aziraphale wanted to do, Crowley would go along with it. He didn’t want to argue anymore, and moreover he knew that Aziraphale was right. Whatever Aziraphale had decided to do, it was the Right thing. Crowley wasn’t by nature a believer in much of anything, but he believed in Aziraphale. And if Aziraphale believed that the immortality of the souls in Heaven was more important than their own lives, Crowley would believe that too. No matter what, he wasn’t going to let any differences of opinion divide them again. The wound of their rift was too fresh and raw for that.

“To the soul escape hatch thingy, of course,” Aziraphale said, as if it were obvious.

“Ah.” So Aziraphale had belatedly come around on the idea of releasing the souls after all. Crowley had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, he was glad that they still had a chance to fulfill the mission and thereby survive. On the other hand, he realized that he had essentially forced Aziraphale into going along with it by getting the ball rolling in Hell. As much as Crowley had been willing to go along with whatever Aziraphale wanted to do, he didn’t want Aziraphale to do the same for him. Aziraphale had actual principles, after all, and Crowley didn’t want the angel to give up on them for the sake of expediency.

There were more pressing matters at hand, though. Crowley asked about the most pressing one that came to mind. “Again,” he said, “just asking out of interest here, but do you know where the soul escape hatch thingy is?”

“Not even a little bit.” Aziraphale spun around helplessly in the middle of the corridor junction.

“So you’re, what? Just checking every room we pass and hoping we stumble upon it?” Despite his efforts to stay cool, Crowley could hear his own voice rising in panic as he heard distant voices coming from some undetermined direction, no doubt an angelic security force out looking for them.

“Is there a better option?” Aziraphale’s panicked tones matched his.

“Actually, yes,” Crowley said, and pulled Aziraphale into a nearby alcove that held a large statue of Jesus on the cross. He wanted to get out of the open so they would have a moment to look up directions. The alcove was not very big, barely large enough to contain him and Aziraphale and Jesus. Crowley glanced up at the statue. It depicted Jesus at his most human moment of despair, face upturned to Heaven, asking the very reasonable question of why God had forsaken him.

Aziraphale reached out and brushed some doubtlessly horrid bit of Hell-flotsam off Crowley’s shoulder, looking askance down at his blood-soaked trouser legs. “My dear,” he said. “You look, well …”

“Like I’ve been to Hell and back? Yeah, got the t-shirt and everything.” Inwardly, though, Crowley was rejoicing at the first part of what Aziraphale had said. Despite everything that had happened, he was still Aziraphale’s _dear_.

Crowley reached into his jacket and pulled out _Lonely Planet Europe_ , and Aziraphale’s eyes lit up when he saw it.

“That’s right,” Aziraphale said, reaching out and taking the book. “Adam said that you had _Lonely Planet Europe_ with you.”

“It’s been equal parts infuriating and helpful, just like always,” Crowley said. “No, don’t do that, it will take it the wrong way.” Aziraphale had lovingly caressed the spine of _Lonely Planet Europe_ , and the book had rippled its pages in pleasure with a sound like a purring cat. Crowley made a mental note that, if they survived, he was going to have to remember to tell _Lonely Planet Europe_ that Aziraphale made a habit of lovingly caressing the spines of books and that it didn’t mean that _Lonely Planet Europe_ was anything special. But for now, he just peeked out of the alcove to make sure there weren’t a bunch of warrior angels ready to sneak up on them. “Ask the book where the soul escape hatch is, it will know,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale opened the book. “It says, _So glad you two crazy kids got back together_ –”

“Tell it it’s a trashy mass-market paperback and that if it likes having its pages bound together it will give us the information we need without the editorializing,” Crowley hissed.

“All right,” Aziraphale said, “now it says …” He trailed off. Crowley stopped watching over the corridor long enough to glare at Aziraphale, whose eyes were moving back and forth across the page.

“All the dull things you’ve insisted on reading to me over the years, and now you’re keeping it to yourself?” Crowley leaned over to try to get a look at the page, but Aziraphale slammed the book shut and tucked it away into his coat. The angel had a strange expression on his face, and Crowley couldn’t read that either.

“What did it say?” Crowley asked, worried.

“Nothing,” Aziraphale said, far too quickly. “It just told me where the soul escape hatch is. It’s in a supply cupboard two doors down on the right from the Great Hall. That’s all the way on the other side of the lobby, so we’d better hurry. Come on, let’s go.”

Crowley eyed Aziraphale suspiciously. As a demon, Crowley was highly skilled in dishonesty, both perpetrating it and detecting it, but this case was a waste of his talents, because literally anyone in the world would have been able to tell Aziraphale was hiding something. But maybe it really was nothing. Maybe _Lonely Planet Europe_ had just made some especially ridiculous comment and Aziraphale was too embarrassed to repeat it.

So Crowley did one more quick scan of the hallway to make sure the coast was clear, then nodded. He and Aziraphale stepped out of the alcove and took off running again. Frustratingly, they were now backtracking in the direction they had come from, so all their previous running had gotten them nowhere. Once again, Aziraphale kept a hold on him as they ran. This time, Aziraphale was clutching his shoulders as if Crowley were a white-collar criminal and Aziraphale was his lawyer and was steering him to the courtroom through a crowd of hostile news reporters. Being clutched at like that made running difficult, and Crowley tried to gently shrug Aziraphale off a couple of times. But Aziraphale just clung on tighter, as if afraid of being separated, and since Crowley had the same fear, he eventually gave up and let Aziraphale cling as tightly as he wanted to.

They reached the bridge, passing the discarded collar and pet cone and handcuffs and pile of angel dust. On the other side of the bridge, there was a junction with another corridor. To the right, there was the sound of a panicked clamor and a flash of what might have been hellfire around the corner. It seemed that Dog was still holding his own despite what sounded like half of Heaven’s forces arrayed against him.

“This way,” Aziraphale said, sensibly directing them to the leftward corridor.

They ran some more. Aziraphale was at least moving with confidence now, suggesting that he knew where he was going. Crowley didn’t have any idea how. Everything in Heaven was identical, immaculate, spotless. There were no landmarks of any sort, nothing like the colorful and horrifying attractions that marked the different sections of Hell. Heaven could have really used some directional signage.

Finally, there was a landmark of sorts. It was a massive door, like the gate to a medieval castle. The door was propped ajar, and as they ran by, Crowley caught a glimpse of a massive cavernous space within, aglow with the hideous heavenly light. He assumed this must the Great Hall that Aziraphale had mentioned, as there had been nothing remotely great about any of the other halls they had seen up to that point. That meant they were only two doors away from the supply cupboard that held the soul escape hatch. In anticipation of nearing their target, Crowley sped up, but at the exact same moment, Aziraphale came to a screeching halt. Because Aziraphale was still clutching his shoulders, the result was that they both almost fell over.

“What, what is it?” Crowley asked, looking around for whatever had made Aziraphale stop in his tracks like that.

“Humans,” Aziraphale said breathlessly, nodding toward the Great Hall. “There are humans in there.”

“So?” Crowley could now see that there was indeed a massive crowd of human inside the Great Hall, and he could hear the murmur of their voices. “This whole place is bursting at the seams with human souls, isn’t it? I mean, that’s why we’re here.”

But Aziraphale shook his head. “No, it’s not like that. These humans are still alive.”

Aziraphale tugged at Crowley, who reluctantly followed the angel into the Great Hall. Crowley was not enthusiastic about the prospect of stopping to chat with humans when they were on the verge of accomplishing their mission. But he could see that this was important to Aziraphale, and he was not about to once again casually dismiss something that was important to Aziraphale.

The Great Hall lived up to its name. The room had the vertical dimensions of a skyscraper, and it stretched off into the distance like a desert highway, as far as the eye could see. The décor was decidedly classical, with ornate Ionic columns lining the walls. Heaven seemed to feel that architecture had begun and ended with the Greco-Romans. The whole place was suffused with heavenly light, which streamed in through a row of stained-glass windows. Crowley squinted, wishing he still had his sunglasses.

Massive though the Great Hall was, it was crowded. Crowded with naked humans, to be precise. There were thousands of humans milling about, some sitting with their backs to the wall, others pacing restlessly, still others standing in small groups and talking. Some were making futile attempts to hide their nakedness with their hands, but most had seemingly gotten over their shame and were letting it all hang out.

Crowley overheard snippets of conversation from a group of three humans standing near the door where he and Aziraphale had entered.

“Worst. Rapture. Ever,” said a handsome young man with a _WWJD_ tattoo on his forearm.

“You’re telling me,” said another human, who had the thickest and bushiest monobrow Crowley had ever seen. “We, the righteous few, the chosen ones, got called up to Heaven just to stand around in some waiting room for eternity? I mean, I’m pretty sure we’ve been here for days.”

“The whole thing doesn’t seem to have been planned out very well,” agreed the third human, an elderly woman whose speech was a bit slurred through her toothless gums. “And where’s Jesus? We were supposed to meet Jesus.”

“Excuse me,” Aziraphale said politely to the assembled humans. But they didn’t seem to have noticed him, engrossed as they were in their complaining.

“It’s like Fyre Fest,” said _WWJD_. “It was marketed as this exclusive once-in-a-lifetime event. Then we show up to find that all the major acts have canceled, there’s no food, nowhere to sleep, and no bathrooms.”

“Hark!” Aziraphale said, his voice magically amplified as if through a heavenly loudspeaker. A hush fell over the Great Hall as everyone harked.

Aziraphale let his wings unfurl, and heavenly light shone forth from him. Maybe he was imagining it, but Crowley thought that Aziraphale’s heavenly light had a different quality than the headache-inducing glare that illuminated the rest of Above. Whereas most heavenly light was harsh as an unshaded lightbulb, the light that Aziraphale was emanating was like the shaft of soft golden sunlight that refracts through clouds after a rainstorm. With that light and his wings out in full glory, Aziraphale looked so radiantly angelic that Crowley would have expected these devout humans to drop to their knees in supplication. But they had apparently been made cynical by their less-than-satisfactory experience in Heaven so far. All they did is glare at Aziraphale impatiently as if he were their cruise director, about to inform the passengers that there had unfortunately been an outbreak of norovirus at the buffet line.

“On behalf of Heaven,” Aziraphale said through his magical public-address system, “I have an announcement to make. The announcement is this. Er, there has unfortunately been a mistake. There was not meant to be a Rapture, not now and not ever. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.” A disgruntled rumbling went up from the crowd, and Aziraphale hastened to add, “But on the bright side, you all still have your bodies. So that means you can go back to Earth and get on with your lives.” He beamed.

The rumbling became, if anything, even less gruntled. “Wait,” said _WWJD_. “You’re telling us we’re supposed to go back to Earth after being raptured? That would be seriously awkward.”

“Yes,” said Monobrow. “Just go back to our jobs and families and act like nothing happened?” He furrowed his monobrow in disgust at the idea.

“We’d never live it down,” Toothless chimed in.

Aziraphale’s face fell, and Crowley felt a surge of anger at these ungrateful humans. He stepped forward, unfurling his own wings. He had no heavenly light of his own to project, but he did have an air of menace, so he projected that instead.

“Listen, you lot,” Crowley said, miraculously magnifying his own voice even though he was shouting loud enough that they could probably hear him in the back anyway. “You’ve got two choices. Stay here in this waiting room for eternity, or head back to Earth now. I honestly wouldn’t care what choice you make, but _he_ cares about you.” He jerked his head at Aziraphale, who was watching him with an expression of gratitude.

“So that means I care too,” Crowley went on, drawing out the word _care_ to make it sound like a threat. “You’re supposed to be the best of humanity, although I don’t know how that was decided and I have my doubts about the criteria used to make that judgment. But anyway, humanity is going through a rough patch, and they need good people, which is apparently what you are. If you really believe in all this peace on Earth, goodwill toward man propaganda, you’ll go back and spread peace and goodwill among your fellow humans. Just don’t be obnoxious about it. By all means, volunteer in a soup kitchen, just don’t tell everyone you meet that you volunteer in a soup kitchen. And _that_ is what Jesus would do.” He finished his little speech with a glare at _WWJD_ , who rubbed at his tattoo as though it were suddenly itchy.

An assenting murmur rippled through the crowd, then Toothless stepped forward. “You make a convincing argument, angel,” she said to Crowley.

“Me?” Crowley laughed. “I’m no angel, I’m a –”

“Very well,” Aziraphale interrupted loudly, nudging him. Crowley saw his point. The devout may not be so convinced by the argument if they knew it had been made by a demon.

“You’d best be off, then,” Aziraphale said to the humans. “You don’t have much time. You’ll have to leave by the main entrance, the pearly gates. St. Peter is there, of course, but don’t worry about him. He’s used to traffic coming in the other direction. Now go!” Aziraphale made a little shooing motion with his hands.

“Er, how do we get to the pearly gates?” Toothless asked.

“Oh, of course.” Aziraphale started pointing in various directions. “Take a left out the door here, then a right, then keep straight at the next junction – scratch that, that’s where the hellhound is, so you’ll probably want to avoid that area – take a left at the next junction, then, let’s see, another right, then right again –”

“Could you maybe write this down?” Toothless looked confused.

Aziraphale sighed, then brightened. “Here, take this,” he said, pulling _Lonely Planet Europe_ out of his coat and handing it to Toothless. “Just open it to any page and it will tell you the way back to Earth.”

“It will?” Toothless eyed _Lonely Planet Europe_ suspiciously.

“You’re giving the humans our magic book?” Crowley asked Aziraphale in a low voice.

“Well, they need it more than we do,” Aziraphale said. “We already know where we’re going, but they’ll get lost without it –”

“Fine, fine,” Crowley said. He wanted to protest that he had had Agnes Nutter sign the book for Aziraphale, but that seemed as though it would require more explanation than they had time for at the moment. Besides, Aziraphale never had been able to resist giving humans gifts that they weren’t worthy of. If it made him feel better to send humans off with flaming swords or omniscient travel guidebooks, Crowley wasn’t going to stand in his way.

Toothless opened _Lonely Planet Europe_ , and her brow wrinkled in confusion and possible offense at what she read there. But she looked up from the book, shouting over her shoulder, “This way!”

The throng of humans started to follow her charge, but Crowley said, “Wait a minute, _wait a minute_. Let us out first. We’re in even more of a hurry than you are.”

The humans obediently paused their charge long enough to let Aziraphale and Crowley out through the bottleneck of the door, then resumed their charge. As Aziraphale and Crowley stood in the corridor and watched the massive crowd of humans make their way toward the pearly gates, the sounds of newly alarmed shouts reached them.

“Good move,” Crowley said to Aziraphale. “Now Heaven’s forces will have even more to contend with, with this lot on the loose. It might be just the distraction we need to finish the job.”

“I suppose so,” Aziraphale said. “That didn’t even occur to me.”

“I know it didn’t.” Things like that never occurred to Aziraphale, but luckily Crowley was there for them to occur to. It was that rare happy circumstance where the Right thing to do had also been the strategic thing to do.

One of the humans in the crowd caught Crowley’s eye. It was a man, early thirties, with olive skin, a beard, and the kindest eyes Crowley had ever seen, other than Aziraphale’s. There was something familiar about the man, not just his physical appearance, but the way reality seemed to shimmer slightly around him. Sort of the way it did around Adam. As Crowley stared, the man smiled a warm smile, full of grace, and gave an enigmatic wave. Then he turned away and was lost in the crowd.

“Was that --?” Crowley asked, unsure of what he had seen. After all, if that was who he thought it was, it had been two thousand years since he had seen the man, who hadn’t been having a great day and wasn’t looking his best at the time.

“What?” Aziraphale asked, distracted. He had been looking down the hallway in the other direction, towards the alleged supply cupboard that held the means to release all souls from Heaven, and had missed the man entirely.

“Never mind.” Crowley shook his head. “Shall we, then?”

It was only a short distance to the prescribed two doors down on the right from the Great Hall, but Aziraphale kept a tight hold on Crowley the entire time regardless. This close, Crowley could feel that Aziraphale was trembling. He supposed that the angel was overcome by the magnitude of what they were about to do to the souls.

“This must be the one,” Aziraphale said, pausing in front of an ordinary-looking door. Crowley wondered if it would be locked, but Aziraphale opened it easily. Crowley supposed that Heaven’s management had assumed that a lock would only draw attention to it and that the best place to hide was in plain sight.

They entered the room, shutting the door behind them. It looked like it was indeed a supply cupboard. There were dozens of boxes stacked on shelves. Crowley was mildly curious about their contents, wondering what sort of office supplies Heaven needed. They couldn’t be as interesting as the supplies Hell kept in stock. Nevertheless, the thing they had been looking for was easy to spot. In the middle of the room, in between two of the shelving units, was a thing that looked like a well, with a heavy lid attached to a giant lever. Heaven’s soul escape hatch was identical to Hell’s, except it didn’t have a sign reading _DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER_. Instead, it had a sign reading _PLEASE DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER._ ‡

“Well, here we go,” Crowley said, making his way over to the lever and unceremoniously putting his hands on it. “You ready?”

Crowley had asked the question as a formality, just to ensure that Aziraphale was ready to run like hell out of Heaven as soon as the lever was pulled. But Aziraphale didn’t reply, and Crowley looked up. Aziraphale was standing directly across from him, on the other side of the lever, and Crowley could see that the angel wasn’t ready. He might never be ready. His eyes were brimming with tears, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

“Oh,” Crowley said, mentally kicking himself again for being insensitive. Even though he had forced Aziraphale into agreeing to consign Heaven’s human souls to oblivion, it was very clear that the prospect of actually doing it was deeply painful for the angel. And despite the stakes, Crowley couldn’t bring himself to do something that would hurt Aziraphale that badly. Not when Aziraphale was standing right in front of him crying over it.

“Angel,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale’s teary eyes met his. “If you really don’t want me to do it, I won’t.”

“I don’t want you to do it,” Aziraphale said.

“All right,” Crowley said, immediately taking his hands off the lever and stepping back. He was about to suggest that they try to escape back to Earth and see if maybe Adam and Anathema and Newt could help them come up with a plan to prolong their lives, but before he could say anything, Aziraphale stepped forward, put his hands on the lever, and pulled.

Just a Crowley had in Hell, Aziraphale overestimated the amount of force he would have to use, almost falling over as a result. Crowley reached out and grabbed Aziraphale’s arms to steady him.

“But –” Crowley sputtered out, as alarm sirens wailed and the familiar glowworm stream of souls began flowing down the hatch. “You said you didn’t want –”

“I said I didn’t want _you_ to,” Aziraphale said, smiling slightly through his tears. “They’re Heaven’s souls, which makes them my responsibility. And I didn’t want you to think I blame you or resent you for this, especially after –” He broke off and shook his head. “I don’t blame you and I don’t resent you. This is something we did together, and I don’t regret it. Just remember that, all right? I don’t regret it.”

“All right,” Crowley said, bewildered. He wondered why Aziraphale was talking like it was the end, when they were almost home free. Of course, if they didn’t get a move on, it would be the end, as once the last soul had drained away the split of Heaven and Earth would be complete and they would be stuck in Heaven with a bunch of very cranky angels. “We should probably get going --?” Crowley hinted.

Aziraphale nodded and wiped away his tears. “You’re right, my dear,” he said, his smile softening as his eyes traced Crowley’s face. “Let’s go.”

They crossed the room, and Crowley made to open the door. “Wait,” Aziraphale said, pushing Crowley behind him. Aziraphale opened the door himself, took a single step out into the corridor, and the flash of a sword glinted into Crowley’s peripheral vision.

Crowley made a wordless cry and pulled Aziraphale back into the supply cupboard. As a result, the sword did not plunge into Aziraphale’s chest, as its initial trajectory had been aiming for. Instead, the blade gashed into his right side. Aziraphale gasped and doubled over in pain, dropping his own sword.

Gabriel stepped into full view in front of the door to the supply cupboard, wielding his sword, which was dripping with Aziraphale’s blood. He was also carrying a shield he had found somewhere, which was scorched with what Crowley assumed was hellsmoke from Dog’s breath. “You stupid bastards,” Gabriel said through clenched teeth, glaring at the stream of souls that zipped merrily by his head on their way to the escape hatch. “Do you realize what you’ve done? I’ll disincorporate you both, and then you’ll never make it back to your precious Earth in time. You’ll be trapped here with us for eternity –”

Crowley launched himself at Gabriel, his mind filled with cold reptilian fury. So reptilian, apparently, that Crowley found himself transforming into a snake in midair without even meaning to. The gambit worked to his advantage, as Gabriel had clearly been expecting to fend off an attack from a human-shaped demon and had not prepared any defense against flying snakes. Crowley sailed right above the point of Gabriel’s uplifted sword and wrapped himself around the archangel’s neck. He could see, through his infrared snake vision, that Aziraphale was leaning against the wall, hot blood dripping from his side. Enraged that Gabriel had once again drawn Aziraphale’s blood, Crowley sank his fangs into the archangel’s throat, taking inspiration from his snake brethren he had seen tormenting the damned in Hell. Gabriel screamed in agony, and Crowley injected every bit of venom he had. If he had known his fangs caused that much pain, he would have bitten Gabriel in the throat long ago.

Gabriel started to aim his sword at Crowley, apparently thought better of that idea given Crowley’s current position, and instead dropped his shield so that he had a hand free to pull at Crowley’s coils and try to extricate him. Crowley just coiled tighter, hoping that he could either choke Gabriel into disincorporation or that his venom would do the job before all the souls finished draining.

As it turned out, Gabriel’s fatal mistake had been lowering his shield. Suddenly, Dog appeared from around the corner. Gabriel made a choked sound of panic and scrabbled for his hellfire-resistant shield, but Dog was too fast. Just as Dog let out a Krakatoa-worthy belch of hellfire, Crowley unspooled himself from Gabriel’s neck and flung himself toward Aziraphale, shifting back into human form in midair. He landed with his wings fully extended, protecting Aziraphale from any stray hellfire sparks, just as Gabriel let out a scream that indicated that Dog had hit his target.

Aziraphale was still leaning against the wall, breathing hard, hand pressed against his side where blood was oozing out. Crowley glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Gabriel was in the process of being consumed by the hellfire, while Dog sat nearby wagging his tail proudly. Crowley lowered his wings, and Aziraphale’s eyes widened as he took in the scene.

“That – was impressive,” Aziraphale said as the last glowing embers that had been Gabriel settled onto the floor.

“Let me see that,” Crowley said anxiously, trying to move Aziraphale’s hand aside so he could examine the wound.

But Aziraphale shook his head, keeping his hand firmly clamped in place. “It’s not that bad. I’m all right.” He sounded surprised at that. “But we need to hurry. There can’t be that many souls left.” He nodded at the stream of souls, which did seem to have slowed down a bit from its peak over the course of the intervening events.

Crowley nodded. They could have Anathema patch up the wound once they returned to Earth, but in order for that to work, they had to return to Earth. He picked up the sword Aziraphale had dropped and, with his other hand, took Aziraphale by the arm. “Which way to the nearest exit?” Crowley asked.

“That way.” Aziraphale pointed to the right, and Crowley started them off in that direction.

Dog stood up and started trotting along beside them, his leash trailing on the floor. “Good boy,” Crowley said to Dog, making a mental note to get him some treats when they returned to Earth.

Aziraphale seemed to be only slightly hobbled by his injury, but Crowley kept his hand on his arm for support regardless. He felt that he needed the support himself anyway, given how close he had once again come to losing Aziraphale. He was just starting to entertain the fantasy that they might have actually done the impossible and lived to tell the tale. That fantasy was dashed cruelly against the shoals of fortune when they turned a corner and found themselves in an unexpected place.

“Bugger,” Aziraphale said in a low voice. Crowley couldn’t have said it better himself.

* * *

*This blue nylon collar was the one that Adam had put on Dog. It had a tag that read _If you’re reading this, get lost, because I’m not. I am Dog, I belong to Adam, and I know the way home._

**Needless to say, there are no buses in Heaven. Overall, Heaven’s public transit system is not very well-developed, but buses in particular are considered to be the least heavenly form of transportation.

***Slack was, of course, invented by Hell.

†Music continuously played on a loop in the background in Heaven. It was more musakal than musical, like the kind of music they play while you’re on hold with customer service so that you will be worn down into submission and give up before you get to actually speak to a customer service representative. It was music that consisted of the necessary parts – individual notes in an orderly arrangement – while completely failing to add up to an interesting or aesthetically pleasing whole. It was the auditory equivalent of taffy, sweet and sticky and stuffed with empty calories. At first listen, one would assume that Heaven’s musical selections were the result of a stealth operation by its enemies, but in fact it was the sort of music most angels enjoyed listening to. Back in the eighteenth century, out of sheer desperation, Aziraphale had proposed piping in some recordings of religious music composed by humans, but management had considered those human compositions suspiciously complex and layered.

‡Heaven was full of the sort of people who leave passive-aggressive notes on office refrigerators and sinks. The kind of notes that sternly warn you not to leave your old food around to stink up the place or not to clog up the drain with coffee grounds, followed by a smiley face to show that there are no hard feelings.


	13. Chapter 13

Aziraphale felt a sense of weariness as he surveyed his surroundings. They had been right around the corner from the closest escalator leading down to Earth, and instead they found themselves here. Why was it that they always ended up back here?

 _Here_ was the Garden of Eden. Not the one of the real-world present, ruined and overgrown, in the Armenian Highlands of Earth. And not the one of the real-world past, lush in the exuberant growth of a young world, which they had visited virtually during their recent adventure on the ethereal plane. This, on the other hand, was a reconstruction. They were still in Heaven. Aziraphale could tell because the plants, green and lovely though they appeared, lacked some indefinable quality that real living plants on Earth had. Maybe that quality came from their constant striving for survival, their roots seeking water, their leaves seeking light.* That was the quality that was missing from everything in Heaven, that Earth was blooming with. It was why all Heaven’s art and architecture and music fell so flat in comparison with humanity’s creations. Heaven couldn’t replicate that quality, because it had no concept of what it was to be alive. Heaven was all style, no substance, all form, no function.

“So _now_ you show up?” Crowley asked in disbelief. He was addressing God, who was walking across the fake Garden toward them.

Normally Aziraphale felt that it was his responsibility to try to make Crowley mind his manners, especially where omnipotent deities were concerned, but he didn’t have the energy for it now. He felt weak from all the blood seeping out of his incorporation, and anyway he agreed with Crowley. If the Almighty was going to interfere with events, Her timing could have been better.

“We need to talk,” God said sternly.

“Let’s not and say we did,” Crowley countered. “We’ve got places to be, and we’re on a bit of a schedule.” He watched with approval as Dog, who was still with them and still in his hellhound form, staked a territorial claim by relieving himself against the Tree of Life.

“I paused time momentarily,” God said. “You have a big decision to make, and I don’t want you distracted by some external deadline like how long it takes all the souls to drain from Heaven.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m distracted by,” Crowley snapped. “My friend here bleeding and in pain. You think you could do something about that?”

God looked at Aziraphale, and although there was compassion in Her eyes, she shook Her head. “That’s not My place. Not anymore.”

“Well, You can talk to Yourself then, because if You’re not helping him, I’m not playing Your game.” Crowley threw the sword to the ground in frustration and turned away, but Aziraphale placed his hand on his shoulder.

“Crowley. We should at least listen.”

Crowley scowled, but turned back. “Well?” he asked God. “Get on with it.”

“This day has been a long time coming,” God said thoughtfully. “My children are all grown. They’re on their own now.”

“You forced our hand,” Crowley said. “If you had just kept Your word and protected us like You said You would, we wouldn’t have had to take such drastic measures. Remember You said we were working for You now? Whatever happened to that?”

“You have been working for Me.” God looked at them placidly.

“Er, no. I think I would remember that. Never filled out any timesheets or anything.”

“You have been doing My will.”

“Again, I’m going to have to disagree. We’ve been doing our own will, thank You very much.”

“You will understand later,” God said patiently. “Aziraphale already does.”

Crowley looked askance at Aziraphale. “Do you?”

“I think so,” Aziraphale said. He thought he did understand what God was saying, but he could see why Crowley was confused. As a demon, Crowley always expected himself to do the wrong thing. He couldn’t see any good in himself, no matter how clearly Aziraphale saw it in him. Aziraphale squeezed Crowley’s shoulder affectionately.

“But I thought you said there was no ineffable plan?” Aziraphale asked God.

God shrugged. “There was a plan, of a sort. If it was ineffable, it was ineffable even to Me. I do move in mysterious ways, don’t I? Anyway, I was pretty much making it up as I went along, just like you two were. I didn’t know how it would turn out, but I think this is the best of all possible worlds.”**

“Right,” Crowley said slowly, in the tone of someone trying to placate a lunatic. Turning to Aziraphale, he said, “Do you mind explaining what She’s talking about?”

“You’ll have time for that later,” God said dismissively. This was news to Aziraphale, and he felt a surge of hope at the prospect of having things like _time_ and _later_.

“In the meantime,” God continued, “as I said, you have a decision to make.”

“Well?” Crowley demanded impatiently.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I chose the Garden as the setting for our conversation today.” Aziraphale and Crowley both shrugged. Aziraphale had assumed it was just a scenic backdrop. “It’s a metaphor,” God continued. “The Garden has two gates. If you leave through the Western gate –” she gestured in that direction – “you will go back to Heaven proper. As you know, nearly all the human souls have left Heaven by now, and when the last one does, Heaven and Hell will be permanently separated from Earth. You will remain on this side of the rift for eternity.”

“I think we’ll take a hard pass on that one,” Crowley said grimly. “What’s behind door number two?”

“If you leave by the Eastern gate,” God said, “you will return to Earth, in the fullest possible sense. You will become human. Let me be very clear about the implications of that. No wings, no miracles, and no immortality. You will be mortal. If you are disincorporated, you will die just like any human. Otherwise, you will live normal human lifespans, and you will grow old, and then you will also die just like any human. All of whom, let me remind you, now go to oblivion after their deaths.”

As the harshness of God’s words settled over them, Aziraphale felt a sense of shock, but it quickly faded to reveal no surprise underneath. This was the road that had been on all along, and in retrospect it seemed inevitable. He felt some grief and some fear at the idea of becoming mortal, but he also felt a strange excitement. He looked at Crowley to see his reaction. It was, to say the least, much more extreme than his own.

“You said this was the best of all possible worlds,” Crowley hissed at God, his face filled with despair. “You said this was what you had planned all along.”

“It is,” God said implacably.

“Then why are you punishing us?” Crowley asked. Dog growled at God, as if in agreement, but his hellfire breath just fizzled out in the intensely divine presence of the Almighty.

“It’s not a punishment. It’s a consequence. My reward for you is that I am allowing you to choose. You separated Heaven and Hell from Earth. Now no one, including you, can move between this realm and the earthly one anymore. You have to stay on one side of the rift or the other. And that also means that power cannot flow across the rift, including the power embodied in your wings, the power that fuels your miracles and your immortality. Now, you are either of this world or that one. And that one –” God nodded toward the Eastern gate – “is now a world without miracles, a world without immortal souls. If you choose that world, you will be fully part of it.”

“If you kill a whale, you’ve got a dead whale,” Crowley muttered. Then he appealed to God again, “But Death said –”

“Death has jurisdiction over mortal souls. He has no say over the fate of beings like you.” A moment later, God clarified, “Unless you choose door number two, of course, then you’re all his. So what will it be?”

It wasn’t a choice at all. Aziraphale started walking toward the East but stopped when he realized Crowley wasn’t following. “Crowley?” Aziraphale asked gently.

Crowley looked torn, and also as if he were about to cry. “I don’t want to,” he said.

“My dear.” Aziraphale stepped over to Crowley and took his hand between his own. “You know this is the only possible choice. We can’t stay here. They would destroy us, for one thing.”

“I know that,” Crowley said. “On Earth we might have the lifespan of a human, but here we’d have the lifespan of a fruit fly.”***

“And more than that, Earth is where we belong. It’s where we’ve always belonged.”

“I know that too. Can’t stand it Up Here. Or Down There.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

A tear spilled out of Crowley’s yellow snake eye. “You were just stabbed.”

“What, this?” Aziraphale was taken aback. “I told you, it’s just a flesh wound. I won’t die from it.” That was true. Aziraphale had been disincorporated enough times over the millennia to get a pretty accurate sense of how much of a beating a body could take, and this one was a four out of ten at most. It wouldn’t kill him even once he was mortal.

“But it will hurt,” Crowley said. “The pain mortals feel, it’s nothing like what we feel. I got a little taste of it, when I possessed that dying human. I don’t want you to feel that. And even if this doesn’t kill you, something will eventually. I don’t want you to die. Not now and not fifty years from now.” His voice hitched with suppressed sobs.

“I know,” Aziraphale said, and wrapped his arms around Crowley. “I don’t want you to die either.” Crowley buried his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder and held on tight. Dog trotted over and licked some Hell-blood from Crowley’s shoe in what seemed to be meant as a gesture of comfort.

“If we go back to Earth,” Aziraphale murmured in Crowley’s ear, “we will die. But we’ll also live. And nothing would make me happier than to live on Earth, with you.” Crowley finally choked out an audible sob at that.

“My dear Crowley,” Aziraphale said. He released Crowley so that he could look him in the eye. “If you really don’t want to go, we won’t.”

Crowley took a deep shuddering breath, clearly trying to get his cool back. Aziraphale fished out a handkerchief from his pocket and solicitously handed it over. Crowley dabbed it against his face to dry his tears, then handed it back. Aziraphale wondered what had happened to Crowley’s sunglasses.† He looked so uncharacteristically vulnerable without them.

“All right, angel,” Crowley said, nodding toward the Eastern gate, “let’s go.” He glanced at Dog. “Here, boy.”

They took a couple of steps, Dog following faithfully behind them, then Aziraphale paused and glanced back at God, who had been shamelessly eavesdropping on them all this time. She probably eavesdropped on everything, being omniscient and all. “What are You going to do now, Almighty One?” Aziraphale couldn’t help but ask.

“Me?” She looked surprised that he had asked. “Well, I’m an empty nester now. Even my Son left Heaven with his new friends, the raptured ones.” Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at that, but God continued, “I suppose I’ll travel for a while. I mean, I created this universe, but I’ve hardly seen half of it Myself. Who knows, maybe I’ll create a new world. It’s been ages since I created anything, had a bit of the old writer’s block, but I finally feel inspired again.”

“Please tell me You’re joking,” Crowley said.

“Don’t worry,” God said, a mischievous twinkle in Her eye. “If I do make another planet, I’ll put it a safe distance from this one. And I’ve learned from my mistakes, so I won’t repeat them.” She smiled at them almost fondly as She added, “And I’ve also learned from what I did right the first time. Myspeed to you both.”

“Thank you, Almighty One,” Aziraphale said. Despite himself, he felt the urge to bow, but the pain at his side was too great, so he bowed just his head. Crowley continued to glare at God, but at Aziraphale’s nudge, he at least nodded at Her in acknowledgment.

Then Aziraphale took Crowley’s hand, and Crowley gripped it tightly back. They walked past the false beauty of the Garden, its trees reaching toward the nonexistent sun in a facsimile of photosynthesis, its unscented flowers with no bees to send perfumed love letters to, its fruit ripe and uneaten. They reached the familiar shape of the Eastern Gate, where they had met so long ago, and Aziraphale turned to Crowley. All the things they had to say to each other didn’t fit into words, but they came in loud and clear anyway. Then, as one, they stepped through the Gate, just as Adam and Eve had, into the wilderness. The first step was, as they say, a doozy. They felt the fall, the pull of gravity calling them home, down to Earth.

* * *

*In the case of Crowley’s plants, which had to strive harder for survival than most, their stems seeking refuge from the terror.

**Leibniz had suggested that this was the best of all possible worlds as a solution to the problem of evil. The gist of his argument is that God thinks up a range of worlds, but can only will one into existence. Some of these possible worlds are squishy, others are covered with sharp spikes, still others are purple in inappropriate places, and some contain evil. Basically, they all have something wrong with them. God surveys the menu of options, and being good, chooses the best, i.e. the least bad, one. Ergo, we live in the best of all possible worlds because God chose the best one to exist in. Much ink has been spilled by other thinkers demolishing this argument, but what those other philosophers didn’t realize was that Leibniz had meant his argument as an elaborate joke. He hadn’t expected it to fly over everyone’s heads, because surely all you had to do was look around and see that no one could seriously propose that this is the best of all possible worlds, as any idiot could imagine a better one. Leibniz himself independently invented calculus, which was not something that an ideal world would be subjected to.

***The median lifespan of fruit flies is 35-45 days, and Crowley’s statement that he and Aziraphale would live that long in Heaven or Hell was overly optimistic. Quite aside from that, if you were to ask the typical fruit fly, they would insist that they live rich and fulfilling lives. It’s quality, they would say, not quantity.

†At that moment, Crowley’s sunglasses were perched on the nose of the coolest-looking ferryman in all of Hell, who was playing blues guitar in what had formerly been the fifth circle but was now a floating nightclub on the River Styx. After finding they no longer had any souls to ferry around or torture, Hell’s workforce had quickly resigned and gotten the party started.


End file.
